Is God Necessary for Human Happiness?

Christians have always heard that only God can make them happy. In fact, some Bible translations render Psalm 16:2 as, "You are my God. My happiness lies in you alone." But an atheist would say, “I don’t need God to be happy. I can get along just fine without him.” It is true that an atheist can experience kinds of happiness without living for God. But if an atheist persistently and culpably rejects God, Fr. Robert Spitzer argues in a new book, he will not be able to experience... Read More

The Catholic Advantage: Why Health, and Happiness, and Heaven Await the Faithful

In his apostolic exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis beckoned Catholics to proudly bring the good news of Catholicism to as many who will listen. He did not call upon Catholics to be callous salesmen, or to triumphantly wear their religion on their sleeves; rather, he asked them to challenge the “sec­ularist rationalism” and the radical individualism that it entails. To be successful, we must provide an alternative, and there is no better tonic for our age than the... Read More

How to Find Happiness

We all want to be happy. Every day, in whatever we do, we seek this goal — one that we share with every other person on the planet. But what exactly is happiness? And how can we find it? To discover the answer to these questions, Sonja Lyubomirsky, in her book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want (Penguin, 2007), examines hundreds of empirical studies. She writes, “Studies show that 50 percent of individual differences in happiness are determined... Read More