So why not join in the conclusion to Rice’s well-reasoned criticisms, particularly if — as I do — you also believe in marriage equality and abortion rights and think the church would be better off if it ordained women and its clergy could marry? Some of us are drawn to the late Pope John Paul II’s view that the only way to understand the institutional church is as “a sign of contradiction.” That’s a term in Catholic theology for a person or situation in which both goodness and its extreme opposition are manifest. Had humanity not been imperfect, there would have been no use for a young Galilean rabbi’s radically transformative teaching. If that teaching’s mere existence had perfected humanity, its adherents never would have required an institutional church, whose human composition makes it imperfect.

Some of our most profound challenges are resolved in the acceptance of contradiction — or so it seems to me.