In a time when crime and inflation are rising together, when independent nations are threatened by massive powers eager to consume them, and when dispassionate public discourse seems impossible, it's bracing to remember the fairness and generosity that make justice and good judgment possible. In the last few months, two friends have highly recommended a [...]
Why is it, we might ask, that the "Odyssey" ultimately feels so consonant with the Old Testament in its depiction of the punishments of sensuality and perfidy, and so profoundly pre-Christian in its elevation of simple, hidden people into rewards they could never have expected? At the risk of undercutting my ethos, I want to [...]
Isn’t this the next thing we really want—young people with vision and confidence, willing to stand up and speak the truth? The metaverse is pure sophistry, the flattery of an audience it literally encompasses. Our students speak on behalf of God and the best of our inheritance. Where are the billions being invested on their [...]
Good translations are crucial since they make accessible what would otherwise require years of study. The problem, of course, lies in what is lost in the process turning one language into another. One of the funniest scenes in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream comes in the woods outside Athens when Bottom the Weaver first begins [...]
On Monday, almost without warning, the Christian world fell from the Christmas season into that plain-sounding condition called "Ordinary Time." Technically, this designation simply means the days and weeks of the liturgical year that do not fall in Advent, Christmas, Lent, or Easter. Most of us struggle, suddenly finding ourselves in this kind of time, [...]
As we celebrate Christmas, the most familiar of stories, we should be aware that its very familiarity can numb us to its importance: the center of all prayer, the mystery of the Incarnation, when God submitted himself to the human form in the radical dependency of a newborn’s pure petition. Last week, the Catholic News [...]
What are our students going to be bringing into their first contact with this world? Primarily sanity. Grounded in the real virtues, cardinal and theological, they understand themselves and others as loved by God, given life by His will, sustained by His purposes. It’s Finals week at Wyoming Catholic College. Since Monday, students have been [...]
The eye is not merely passive. "Watch this," somebody says, and the eye focuses. But on a deeper level, what can reveal the inner governance of our attention, which determines what we truly see? Last week, our daughter Julia had a seriously inflamed eye. It had none of the usual symptoms of conjunctivitis. The doctor [...]
One of the puzzles of human nature—call it evidence of original sin—is that when things are going well, the impulse to gratitude vanishes. To say that we owed this happy state of things to others would dim our glory and injure our pride. We might thank our admirers (of whom there are surely many), as [...]
The teaching of modern universities is that we inhabit a godless, indifferent, pointless material universe where consciousness itself is an accident. A prevailing nihilism settles out from this failure of questioning. If we reopen the essential questions, we can have faith that the truth will sustain us and reward us for our love of it. [...]
Isn’t part of the problem in the culture at large a lack of the personal correction and encouragement that accompany truly being known to those around us? Don Rags sessions have an immediate effect on the behavior of students, as professors often notice, but they mean more than that. This kind of recognition helps personal [...]
Anyone who questions the usefulness of literature might want to reflect how often every day we try to fit people’s actions into a cogent narrative. What happened exactly? we ask. What choice was made, and who made it? What were the consequences? Given these consequences, what conclusions about the character of the person who made the [...]
Heroes and saints are not necessarily easy to get along with, since they answer a higher call that puts them at odds with the world around them, even those closest by. It is not easy to fit the hero into ordinary life, but without these primordial figures, we would not hope for more in human [...]
If this had been a normal year, I might have written a column on summer reading in mid-June, say, with a couple of relatively uneventful months stretching ahead. I might have anticipated which books I wanted to read about the cultural situation we face and the place of strong, traditional, liberal arts education in addressing [...]