Why did St. Augustine write "The City of God"? Why should it continue to compel our attention today? It was the one project St. Augustine prized above all others and would spend fourteen years of his life putting it all together: The City of God. He finished the last of the twenty-two books in the year 426, [...]
The sheer impact of St. Augustine upon the life of the Church, of the emerging medieval world he had a hand in shaping, has never been equaled. Perhaps the first and most obvious thing to be said about St. Augustine, the span of whose life was close to eighty years—from A.D. 354 to 430—is that he [...]
Part of the continuing fascination of Augustine for people who know almost nothing of the period in which he lived, whose own time and place seem so completely removed from the corruptions of late antiquity that for them Augustine might as well have come from another planet, is the fact that here was a man whose [...]
Putting it in precise Augustinian terms, it is the choice between the love of God and the love of self that will determine the outcome of a man’s life. There are two forces at work in the world—gravity and grace—and each of us must choose to follow one or the other. There is no third [...]
What was it about Augustine’s "Confessions" that made it so readable, or managed to endear its author to so many who read it? Might its appeal have had something to do with the fact that here was a great sinner who lived to regret his sins, and so completely reform his life as to become [...]
Who among us is erudite enough to set about measuring the immensity of the achievement wrought by Augustine, whose depths clearly defy one’s best efforts to plumb? It was during the pontificate of Paul VI, who has since been raised to the altar, that a gathering of scholars arrived in Rome for a conference on [...]
Because of the extraordinary valor shown by so many young men on that distant beach, America stood singular and tall in the saddle. It was her finest hour and for that at least we must be grateful. General Mark W. Clark, whose Fifth Army led the capture of Rome in June of 1944, was the [...]
Politics, we are always to remind ourselves, is not God; to pretend otherwise is an affront to God. Nevertheless, politics may prove helpful in making it easier for us to get to God. Especially these days when it becomes more urgent than ever to remind the state of those things it may not do to [...]
For all that we are often lost amid the loneliness, hostage to the gravity and grief that cause us to fall, there is always that sudden and unexpected upsurge of grace and glory to lift us high above the dark and sullen weight of so many dead and dying leaves... An old and valued friend, [...]
On the day C.S. Lewis died—November 22, 1963—the world was hardly in a position to take notice. The assassination of an American President, after all, had clearly and shockingly co-opted everything that day, including even the ending of a life unsurpassed for its sheer breath catching lucidity in defense of ordinary Christian belief. But history, [...]
“In my beginning is my end.” ∼ T.S. Eliot In a passage often cited from the Pensees, which the author sets down in grim and graphic detail, Pascal summons the reader to reflect on the awful finality of death. “The last act is bloody,” he tells us, “however fine the rest of the play. They [...]
Why has it become so maddeningly difficult to make judgments about other people? About the actions especially of people who want to kill us? Indeed, whose stated aim is to bring the Great Satan (i.e., America) to its knees, and then to cut off its collective head? Is it too much of a stretch to [...]
Tourism, as anyone with a passport can tell you, has become a very big business, particularly in places that no longer thrive in the customary practices of industry and commerce. Take Genoa, for instance, one of Europe’s largest cities along the Mediterranean coast and still the grandest seaport in all Italy, whose bright and shiny brochures [...]