Abortion long ago became a natural symbol for the loss of a spiritual center. Not divine law, but individual will is the measure, and rejecting the child within the body becomes its expression. Challenging Roe v. Wade is not a matter of standing in judgment against women, but of changing a culture of death. With [...]
Good war films put the objective in front of the audience and show repeatedly what must go heroically right to achieve it. And it is the depiction of real heroism in "Top Gun: Maverick" that makes the film so exhilarating. The weekend after the graduation of the Class of 2022, my wife, my daughter, and [...]
Commencements always make us sentimental, but somehow this unexpected convergence of the meandering of a river and the perfection of the circle struck home to me almost as an allegory for our graduates. Last week, the 37 graduates of the Class of 2022 at Wyoming Catholic College walked across the stage at the Lander Community [...]
Who would have thought that Mother's Day would bring us the spectacle of churches attacked and Supreme Court Justices sought out at home to be demonstrated against and vilified for their reasonable beliefs? Indeed, many things in the contemporary world seem hard to believe. The idea that everything we experience could be an elaborate deception goes [...]
Reading books is already a niche activity. Our lives are not so much interrupted by as constituted of distractions. Sitting down to read a book requires elbowing everybody and everything aside. Last week, Mark Bauerlein of First Things wrote a witty invective against the National Council of Teachers of English for their most recent posturing—a [...]
For Socrates, the best city will “track down the nature of what is fine and graceful, so that the young, dwelling as it were in a healthy place, will be benefited by everything. And from that place something of the fine works will strike their vision or their hearing, like a breeze bringing health from [...]
Holy Week is a week of paradoxes: the greatest evil and the greatest good occupy the same deed, the same space on the Cross, the same tomb. At Wyoming Catholic College, the phenomenon known elsewhere as “spring break,” which sounds more or less restful, comprises an important part of our outdoor curriculum. Most students go [...]
These last days of Lent might be a good time to remember those who have come before us in our families, those who begot us and those who begot them, and so on backward into that past where every one of our ancestors used the pronoun “I” just as we do in this living moment. [...]
Citizens are free when they see and respect their dependence on each other. They can best continue to do what they know to be the right thing if they are committed to political self-rule. Ukraine’s spirited defense of itself is a shining example of this kind of freedom. Ukrainian defiance has shaken many people across [...]
Those of us in the contemporary world imagine that we are too busy to indulge in free time. Leisure and contemplation might have worked in past ages with their sleepy, bucolic landscapes and colorful peasants, but it won’t work in ours. But God commanded us, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” almost as [...]
"The Chosen" addresses and transfigures the duality we love in our popular mythology: a man who is also God. Repeatedly, it raises questions about how we imagine the humanity of Jesus. What was it like when Peter and Andrew pulled in that massive haul of fish after catching nothing all night? How do you picture [...]
In this time of renewed world strife, it might seem counter-intuitive or even irresponsible to argue that, more than ever, we need genuine old-fashioned liberal education whose ends are wisdom and virtue. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last week stunned the world, but perhaps what ought to be truly stunning is that almost everyone, across [...]
The great past instructs the contemporary conscience. Obviously, playwright Robert Bolt was aware of the persecutions going on in fascist and communist regimes, and his Thomas More sees into the 20th century future and its need for martyrs. His More also anticipates the “wokeism” of the 21st century when the thoughts of our hearts increasingly [...]
Belief in the objective existence of the world outside ourselves, the world to which we submit our thought, is our deepest inheritance. Last Thursday, Bishop Steven Biegler of the Diocese of Cheyenne came to Wyoming Catholic College to bless our new Immaculate Conception Oratory—“new,” at least, in our use of it. As I have mentioned [...]