America readers will be familiar with “the Catholic both/and”—the idea, as the Jesuit writer Felix Just put it, that “both the one side and its opposite not only can, but must be held together in tension, even if they seem to be contradictory, in order to understand the whole truth, the whole of the complex reality.”
Jesus was God and man. Humans have a body and a soul. We are saved through faith and works. These “vibrant paradoxes,” in Bishop Robert Barron’s phrase, are a hallmark of Catholic thought. On the table before me one evening was an emblem of another, if less theologically lofty both/and: the relationship of Catholicism to alcohol.
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