My latest article at Catholic Exchange is available here: The Universal, the Particular, and How Roman Catholics Think

“If our God is a God Who made man as a being who leans towards the eternal and transcendent that we find in philosophy and theology, He is also a God Who created quirky details like donkeys, wheat, and grapes — and the surprising thing is His fancy for using each of these quirky details for transcendent ends. We have a savior who was God and could thus save us from our humanity, and who was also a man and who could thus be real to us in a way a distant deity could not. Christianity is founded on the remarkable union of the abstract divine and the particularly human. We believe that the philosophical Absolute and the Infinite Ground-of-All-Being was also a carpenter from small-town Judaea, whose Church is administered by an elderly man in the palaces of an Italian city called Rome. These two aspects of reality, its particularity and its universality, are found everywhere in Catholic thought: in our theology, our sacraments, and even our literature.”