Books by Paul O'Callaghan

The modern culture we live off and take for granted is an elevated, sophisticated one, containing a great variety of precious anthropological insights and strengths, with a surprising adaptability and openness to absorb, to clarify and to unite. However, in the present moment it comes across, in many cases, as a culture detached from the faith that gave life to it in the first place, and without which it may simply not survive. In fact it has become, of late, a fragile culture, a culture less and less capable of adapting and absorbing and uniting. This may be seen in the way many aspects of modern culture and public life have fallen into a pathology of rationalism, individualism, inequality, discord, ingratitude. This may be seen in our attempt to live in isolation from our fellow humans, unwilling to recognize the world we live in and the privileges we enjoy as God's gifts. Faith Challenges Culture: A Reflection of the Dynamics of Modernity describes the process in two directions: how culture challenges faith to provide answers that have not been previously given, and how faith challenges culture not only by showing modern culture's fragility and ambivalence, but also by posing new questions.

Martin Luther‘s effort to put God at the very center of human life hinged on five principles: sola gratia, sola fide, sola Scriptura, solus Christus, and ecclesia semper reformanda. They formed the basis for a much-needed reformation of the Christian church projected by Luther and others. Besides inspiring an important renewal of Christian life, however, the Reformation also occasioned the breakup of Western Christianity, which in turn justified religious wars, provided an anti-witness to Christian revelation, privatized the faith, and facilitated the secularization of society as a whole. On the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, this book attempts to appropriate, situate, and to some degree reinterpret Luther‘s most precious and enduring insights on the basis of the above five principles, which come to mean that God‘s being and action must always come first. On the basis of Luther‘s writings, the book also attempts to consider how grace reaches out to freedom, faith to reason, Scripture to church tradition, Christ to ministry, church to mediation. God‘s being and action always come first, yet God‘s first gift, creation, and the mediations that derive from it are not undone or rendered irrelevant.

Pope Francis has stated that his own vocation as a Christian came to him as an awareness that God is ahead of us, that God thinks about us and looks after us before we even realize it. This is the essence of grace, a love story that begins with God. The present book is an introduction and exploration of that storyof the Christian life as not about humans looking for God but God seeking us out.The story that unfolds demonstrates that grace is not something secondary or superficial but primary and constitutive, from crucial beginnings in election and creation to the divine actions of justification and renewal, fostering a life of virtue and obedience. Within this context, the book explores the issues of the relationship of grace and freedom, the dynamics of justification, the true meaning of merit, life as a son or daughter of God, the action of the Holy Spirit, the sacraments and the Church, the role of the ascetical life, and the eschatological horizon of the life of grace. In an accessible account, the author narrates the doctrine of grace as directed toward and explained by the fact that God has destined humans to spend eternity in communion with the Triune creator.