Hello! Welcome to my website! My name is Cole DeSantis. I am a Rhode-Island based Catholic writer, researcher, and public speaker who specializes in theology.

This website is dedicated to exploring the philosophical and spiritual roots of Catholic thought. But first, some background on myself: I was born in a Catholic family and raised in the Catholic faith from childhood. Growing up, religion was a central part of my family’s life. This aspect of my upbringing eventually came to intersect with another important element of my family life, namely the strong emphasis placed on education. Inquisitiveness was something encouraged, and almost immediately after first being taught the faith I remember (almost incessantly according to my family!) asking a lot of the typical questions most people ask about religion: Why does God permit evil? How do we know Jesus was a real historical figure? What does God look like? How do we reconcile the creation story with the theory of evolution? Answers - at least those I found to be intellectually satisfying - weren’t always given, but this only fanned the flames of my curiosity.

I attended a Catholic high school. As you’d probably expect from this, religion class was a consistent part of my high school experience. During this time I was blessed with a series of great religion teachers who made heavy use of both Scripture and the Catechism. During my time in high school, I became more comfortable with reading and tackling the meaning of the Biblical texts, and often had the intellectual underpinnings of Catholic doctrine explained to me in a manner that I found both intellectually satisfying as well as intriguing. This inspired me to pursue a degree in theology in college.

I currently hold both a B.A. and M.A. in theology from Providence College, a Catholic college run by priests of the Dominican Order in the Diocese of Providence (Rhode Island). I currently work as a journalist for the Rhode Island Catholic, the official diocesan newspaper of the Diocese of Providence, as well as an adjunct professor of theology at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. I have written articles with such publications as OnePeterFive, Church Militant, Pop Culture and Theology, The New Blackfriars, Crisis, and the Homiletics and Pastoral Review. I also regularly gives talks in theology, particularly on the parish level, and run a YouTube channel titled “Exploring the Faith”.

From a topical or thematic perspective, there is no singular focus to my website. What unites the content of my website is an overarching mission, namely to take the intricacies and nuances of Catholic theology and explain it to the average, everyday person in a manner they can understand. I hope to do so not by means of oversimplifying the faith, but taking all the intricacies of the Catholic faith - the Catholic religion with all its beauty and sophistication - and attempting to present it in a way that most people can understand and appreciate.

In a word, I hope to do for the Church what my teachers did for me: making the act of navigating and making sense of Church teaching seem a little less overwhelming, and therefore to make people see the beauty of the Catholic religion as it really is. I hope to, without subtracting anything from the loftiness or profundity of the Biblical texts or Catholic theology, presenting the faith in a way that makes people regularly go, “Aha!”

There are three ways in which I hope to do so: the first two are closely interconnects, namely 1)analyzing the intellectual, historical, and spiritual backdrop of Church teaching and the debates within Catholic theology (and theology more generally) and 2)Analyzing recent events in the life of the Church. Both of these are preparations for the final way in which I hope to bring about my goal, namely using an intellectually and spiritually robust understanding of Church teaching as a context within which to critically address certain broader philosophical, political and cultural issue.

With this in mind, I hope you enjoy my website! I hope you find my articles compelling and enlightening. Feel free to share them, and to contact me with any questions or comments.

God bless!