Many people believe that faith and reason are incompatible. Faith is for those who blindly trust what their religion tells them or what they feel is true. Reason is what we have proof for; it’s for the logical ones, and faith is for the childish and weak.

This is an over-characterization, but there is truth to the generalization. The truth here lies in the fact that this mindset is prevalent, but not that it is valid.

Every year, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) on Jan. 28.

Over the course of his lifetime, Aquinas wrote over 8 million words. He was a Dominican priest who spent hours each day in prayer and study. His life was devoted to God and to writing about the truth. Aquinas was groundbreaking in many ways because he was able to show the validity of church doctrine through the use of reason.

Pope St. John Paul II wrote in his masterful encyclical, “Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason),” that faith and reason are “like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” The pope, who was trained in........

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