Original sin, widely denied today, is nevertheless the condition in which our spiritual life begins. Fetal psychology helps one see original sin as a psychic negation of the created reflections in Christ of the traits of divine love within the Trinity. Hence, only through Christ can such damage be healed. But before we can live in the full freedom and power of the Holy Spirit, we must relive, in Jesus and as He did, all that God led His people through, from the fall of Adam till Jesus' death and resurrection. Through the «spiritual sense» of the Old Testament, each word of which speaks of Jesus, we learn how to do this. The loss of this sense, embedded in the doctrine and practice of the much maligned «institutional Church» but forgotten by most Christians, explains the chasm that has opened between the intellectual life of the West and the spiritual life of Christians.

The Author: Paul M. Quay, S.J., Research Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago since 1981, was also an associate professor of Physics and of Theology at St. Louis University for 14 years. He has written some 75 scholarly articles and a book, The Christian Meaning of Human Sexuality, which has been translated into Spanish and Polish. He earned Licentiates in both Philosophy and Theology from West Baden College of Loyola University Chicago, and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from M.I.T. After a year of post-doctoral research in Physics at Case I.T., he spent two and a half years in France and Germany, studying Philosophy of Science and Ignatian spirituality.