Many religious people feel a need for clarity. They need to have a sense that they are right, or at least on the right path and relatively sure of their direction. This is an understandable yearning, but what may be insufficiently appreciated is the place for confusion in our spiritual life.

The humility of Benedict's decision to give up power will affect future papacies, all to the good.

It goes well beyond contraception

Why Historical Fact Isn't Enough

It Is Not Death We Fear

The Mystery of What God Has Done for Us

Make it humble & make it persuasive

How can you believe that God cares more for humans than for any other part of creation?

  ’Into Great Silence’ & profound evil

  The millstone doesn’t belong around the neck of the Zeitgeist.

  Is Andrew Sullivan right to emphasize the role of doubt in any serious theology?

Why is our movement toward death so full of suffering?

"Family values" is a delightful slogan, but what are we really extolling?

"What are churches for? The answer may seem obvious: to preach and try to live the word of God and to celebrate the sacraments. But what does this mean? A recent First Things article argues that two distinct and irreconcilable visions of the church are at war, revealing a theological chasm between a ’church of demands’ and a ’church of acceptance.’" By John Garvey.

  How neither the God rejected by neo-Darwinians nor the God posited by intelligent designers has much to do with the God of the Bible. By John Garvey

The attitude of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI toward other religions has long been appreciated by non-Catholics. “But in the attitudes of both men toward internal Catholic matters there is something many Orthodox find a bit disturbing,” writes John Garvey, an Orthodox priest and Commonweal columnist.

It may seem pointless, and in a lovely way it is, to install a series of frames containing large hanging saffron rectangles over twenty-three miles of Central Park pathways. But after years of trying, in February the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude managed to bring it off. Called The Gates, the project involved the installation of 7,532 frames, and the fabric was hung so high that the tallest people could walk along the paths easily. The money was raised by the artists, and much of it went to pay those who installed the work, and to pay monitors who directed people to interesting routes and also used poles to unfurl banners tangled by the wind.

In the wake of the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, columnist and Orthodox priest John Garvey asks, “Is God responsible”? As Garvey notes, all tragedy—on scales great and small—cause us to question God’s power.

Is it possible for the Met to top its last exhibition of Orthodox works of art? Yes, says Orthodox priest and Commonweal columnist John Garvey.