Confessions of an Armchair (Moral) Geologist

When Bob Royal started The Catholic Thing several years back (with the merry band of Hadley Arkes, Ralph McInerny, Brad Miner, Michael Novak, Fr. James V. Schall, and others), I was pleased and honored to become one of the first regular contributors. Since then, the Faith & Reason Institute’s projects and my own have generated synergy so often that formalizing the ties has come to seem a logical conclusion.

So I’m delighted to be joining the Institute now as a Senior Research Fellow, and to extend these public thanks to Bob for his continuing comradeship and shared vision. With this column, I’d like to give readers of The Catholic Thing a preview of some of the work to come from our new fellowship.

During the past ten years, one puzzle has repeatedly preoccupied my research and my thoughts: What causes secularization? What turns societies that once feared God into societies that now jeer Him? What, exactly, catapults some modern men and women out of religious orbits, and into secular ones?