About Aquinasblog

Do you know the feeling  you get walking into a European cathedral or one of our old immigrant churches? Do you remember going to church in such a beautiful sacred space, where you felt the actual presence of God? Do you remember when religion defined the meaning of the world not only with words but with images? 

Why are these experiences and understandings mostly a thing of the past? Why is the experience of the sacred lost to so many of us in modern religious practice? And what happened to our intellectual tradition? Unless you’re poor or fundamentalist, odds are that old-time religion is something you may have left behind. In many ways that’s a good thing. But it comes with a serious and often unrecognized cost. Gone for most of us is a communal experience of the divine: rituals in beautiful sacred spaces that bring us out of our ordinary lives and put us face to face with mystery; prayers that make holy the passage of time. A way to face the most intense experiences of life and death with others. Also lost is an intellectual tradition that defines a view of life, society and behavior, and a memory held in common.

I miss it all and want it back. The challenge is to get it back in a more sane way than how we experienced it in the past, without the wrappings of authoritarianism and dogmatism that are classically associated with old-time religion. Can we get back an authentic communal experience of the sacred? Can we create an understanding of religion that is both connected to the tradition and accessible to a trained scientific mind?

How that might happen is what this site explores.

For more information about how all this got started, see the About page in the summary of the thought of Aquinas.

And to see an outline of where it’s going, see The Book.

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Thanks.