What I find so hard and why Houston is so much like Heaven is that I know there will be many great things in my new place. Things I will not be able to imagine. New friends unasked for and unlooked for whom God will put in my path. New opportunities that I would never [...]
Tradition! Tradition! Sing it like Tevye. We all know that not all traditions are healthy or good or right. Fiddler on the Roof, much as I find it entertaining, strikes me on every viewing as just a bit too much in the spirit of the 1960s in its glee at razing traditions sensible or no. [...]
In her postscript, Midge Decter acknowledged that the questions of the modern world are not simple.How should we combine the good things of the new world with the parts of our nature that were acknowledged in the old but now left behind? The recent death of Midge Decter at the age of 95 had me [...]
If you are not praying, try to pray irregularly. If you are irregularly praying, try to pray regularly. If you are regularly praying, try to pray a bit more. And remember that wherever you are spiritually, God has not moved. It may seem obvious, but the first thing to say about the pursuit of deeper [...]
Alongside his poetry and the charming essays of family life and ordinary glory he has collected in other volumes, Jake Frost has now shown he is a teller of tales. In "The Light of Caliburn," he reminds us that though the legends of long ago are wreathed in smoke, the fire at their heart continues [...]
We chain ourselves to God to receive the true freedom to keep our promises and to further give our lives away to God and to others. Action—doing, giving, even enduring—are what is important. Not our feeling, psychological state, or natural optimism. The Joy of God: Collected Writings, by Sister Mary David (208 pages, Bloomsbury, 2020) [...]
The sacramental imagination must not be an exercise in the imaginary. It must traffic in images of reality that include the startlingly beautiful, the ugly, and the outwardly disagreeable but inwardly luminous. Writing in the early 1840s, the then-Anglican John Henry Newman proposed to a friend that a good article could be written with the [...]
Strange though it might seem at one level, our Lord seems to have been a general contractor. Or perhaps it is not strange. After all, if he is indeed the Word by whom the Father created all things, it is perhaps fitting that he would do in miniature what he does at the level of [...]
Missed the Boat’s production of “Moonshine Abbey” was a delight because of the slapstick humor and mixture of realistic and insane dialogue in which its priestly writer specializes. It was powerful because it tapped into the hopes and fears of young Catholics who want to believe in the certainty of God but are hampered by [...]
Motherhood and any kind of public service or career are seen as a binary choice for many women. Many women have now agreed that “you can’t have it all” and have decided that the thing to sacrifice is the motherhood. But is the choice true? Kathryn Rombs, Motherhood: An Extraordinary Vocation (176 pages, Our Sunday [...]
"Spider-Man: No Way Home" avoids the most obvious of our contemporary lies about reality, but it too paints a flawed understanding of evil, both in how to prudently fight against it and how it attaches itself to us humans. Don’t set your public policy or moral clock by the newest superhero movie. It’s got some [...]
Chesterton once observed of his perennial sparring partner, George Bernard Shaw, that he would need to live for 300 years to finally be able to accept Catholic faith. Might we apply that same rule to the late controversialist Christopher Hitchens? A prolific writer of twelve books and five collections of essays, and a staple in [...]
I know how it is. Our shopping isn’t done yet, either. That’s why we all need some ideas. Here are some good ones: books you’ve seen, not on TV, but—even better—on TIC. Admit it—you forgot to give somebody a gift and are scrambling. In "A Hans and Franz Christmas Book List," I offered a selection [...]
You remember Hans and Franz, the two bodybuilders depicted as cousins of Ahhhnold Schwarzenegger from Saturday Night Live and played by Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon? One of their two most famous catchphrases was, “Hear me now, believe me later!” That’s my line for this list of book gift ideas. I’ll be writing fuller reviews [...]