Paying attention to the guidance of the heart is no guarantee of prudent action, as Mark Antony and Cleopatra demonstrate with grand style, but there is something nobler in giving the heart its whole due than in bypassing its counsel and resorting to mere calculation. According to the 17th century mathematician and Catholic apologist Blaise [...]
Contemporary culture encourages cowardice as the human norm. This new emphasis, including the decade-old insistence on “safe spaces” at colleges, is something more dangerous than anything we might encounter otherwise. Not long ago, I heard a psychologist saying that the most important thing in his practice is the safety of his clients. Understandably, patients in [...]
Ascension Thursday is the fortieth day after Easter, the day when Christ led his disciples out as far as Bethany and was taken up into heaven before them. The forty days after Easter clearly mirror the forty days of Lent. That day, that Thursday, has a profound significance. As a convert to Catholicism, I often [...]
Once mastered, cursive enables us to write rapidly without lifting the pen from the paper—a skill that has major advantages over printing. Cursive now stumps many college students today. Whether it can ever make a comeback seems to be an issue. At about 10 o’clock the other night, my wife called me out of my [...]
No question, the history of race in America is a vexed one. There are real wrongs to address, certainly, but there is also a persistent state of grievance, a kind of moral or spiritual condition, in which one eschews peace of mind, an abyss of soul where one relives injustices done or imagines the goods [...]
The culture of a real community like that of college isn’t simply a matter of texts and discussions of ideas, but of live emotion and thought, real presence to each other, a continuous awareness and exchange that locates each person in the larger community. Yesterday afternoon, during one of our regular meetings with the freshman [...]
For those doing all right by themselves like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, Christ’s Resurrection from the dead throws everything off balance because it introduces something entirely new. To believe the testimony of the Gospels opens avenues to happiness that are entirely discomfiting to the complacency of mere identity. Flannery O’Connor had a way of compressing whole [...]
Rome does not occasionally become relevant in our understanding of political upheaval. Rather, it forms part of our very identity as Christians and heirs of the Western tradition that it helped shape. No one saw the essential drama of Rome more clearly than William Shakespeare. In the current issue of Atlantic magazine, editor-at-large Cullen Murphy [...]
Not swayed by popular enthusiasm, Edmund Burke was the first substantial thinker to address the full-blown entrance of radical ideas into the political sphere and the first to express a truly conservative umbrage at the imposition of abstractions onto a world of particular, distinctive circumstances. Juniors at Wyoming Catholic College have just read in Humanities [...]
For a long time, I suspect, we will think back on this past year with a sense that it has revealed many things about institutions and individuals. My hope is that, as this rift heals, its deepest effects will be the restoration of our social nature, a new love of liberty, and a renewed gratitude [...]
We love God, follow the reason implicit in sexual nature, and consider having children the greatest privilege bestowed on us, the greatest of gifts. Each child is a huge promise, a new world aborning, and I cannot imagine a financial anxiety so serious that it would make anyone think otherwise. In one of the customs [...]
The season of Lent is superimposed upon the life of work that we already lead, but here, more than ever, the pressing need is for silence, renunciation, and the leisure of deep work in prayer and spiritual reflection, achieved without deadlines or anxiety. Back before the students returned to Wyoming Catholic College this semester, I [...]
Persuasion is not an antiquated art for a lost era. In a time of base language and tweets, social media and the hive mind of the internet, it makes sense to study the principles of oral rhetoric and to understand effective and responsible appeal to an audience. A strange madness descended this week upon Lander, [...]
Simply speaking, literature works with the mode of thought most natural to the human mind—that is, thinking in images, comparisons, characters, speeches, and actions. Every household of parents and children has a cast of distinct characters whose various performances become stories in the family. Our five-year-old grandson Andrew, for example, though a domestic terrorist by [...]