For Christopher Dawson, there was the inflection point, the point of intersection where the enfleshment of God took place to fire the historical imagination. There could be no other event, no possible happening in the great sea of history to compare with the coming of God among us, pitching His tent in the midst of our [...]
The only question that matters is this: Is the Church to give the world a Christian shape, or must she instead shape Christianity to the world? Everything turns on the answer we give to that question. As often happens with the most portentous and far-reaching events, the learned and the clever will be the last to [...]
A culture without public prayer is a culture that no political intervention can preserve. If the life of prayer is a vocation offered to all, then it follows that the practice of prayer must equally be within the reach of all. It is not an esoteric exercise, in other words, for which only the most [...]
A well-ordered society requires the presence of three essential relationships: man's connection to the world, to one another, and to God. A young man anxious about his immortal soul approaches his pastor to complain about so many mediocre souls he’s forced to keep company with at Mass. “There must be a parish somewhere,” he asks, “where [...]
None of us wants a theocracy, nor do we wish to have a totally secularized order. But both secular and sacred are to be joined in some way, the only question being how and to what extent. Have we still got a Christian consensus around which Americans of every possible persuasion can rally round? A public [...]
What is it that finally holds a society together? What enables it to cohere? Nothing less, St. John Henry Newman reminds us, “than a common reverence for a certain sacred possession.” Does anyone know what the central myth of America might be? I mean, isn’t there a story out there we tell ourselves about our origins? Our [...]
Ours is the first nation under God which makes no real provision for God in its public life, owing to a great and sundering wall of separation between Church and State, religion and politics, faith and life. We live in a country whose citizenry have been, almost from the beginning of the Republic, carefully coached to [...]
Catholic culture is, first and foremost, a society built upon a family whose identity draws from the Holy Family. In a culture where every contour of the public life assists in communicating the message of Jesus Christ, the first citizen of the realm will be the Church, she who is both Bride and Body of Christ, [...]
So, then, what is Christian Culture? What does it look like? Are there certain defining features that distinguish it from what passes for culture these days? And if so, how are we to recognize them? What it is, at the deepest level, is an answer to the question raised by the Hebrew psalmist in a [...]
We can only bloom where we are planted. So, our job as finite beings—rooted in the soil of this world while yet being summoned to an infinite and eternal destiny—is to provide the best possible soil: culture. How to account for the Good News of Jesus Christ? The short answer is the Holy Ghost, who, in [...]
As necessary as the evangelical imperative is to the life of the Church, since without it the Gospel withers and dies, it is not enough simply to proclaim the Good News. For all that the world needs to hear the message of Jesus Christ, merely doing so does not exhaust the possibilities of bringing Christ to [...]
How, exactly, does the Church propose to bring Christ to the world, demonstrating His presence among men in order that she might then transport them home to Heaven? Let us try to imagine a Church filled with Christ, overflowing with His presence and power. Not too difficult, is it? Is that not the customary, immemorial even, [...]
Jesus Christ remains absolutely central to the life of the Church and, indeed, to the whole created order of the universe. In a Catholic economy of salvation, the two orders of nature and grace, of man and God, are not sundered one from the other. Jesus became the Savior of both realms, and God meant [...]
What exactly is culture but an embodied religion, a faith that is given flesh and blood and bone in a visible and public way? Might it be possible, therefore, to build a culture where it is easier for men to be virtuous? I am looking at a couple of random lines lifted from a bleak little [...]