We choose our relationship with Death, much the way we choose our relationship with Life; is it going to be about taking or giving, fear or love? Recently, late at night, I passed out twice. The first time, I wondered why my eye was suddenly in sharp contact with the edge of the bathroom counter; [...]
This city, this Promised Land, this Banquet, is what all those who love God long for, and in order to see it, we must always be ready, like the virgins with the lamps, for God to break in and re-adjust our imaginative visions, our unexamined assumptions, our paradigms, to align with who He is, the [...]
In these darkest of present moments, the smallest of actions, like telling the truth and living out the natural law—actions that in former ages would be simple common sense—are now sanctified and sanctifying. There are no more Common Men: only the choice between being a shade blown about in the tempest, adding to the darkness, [...]
The baby in the cave is a paradox that reveals you and demands your potential for dignity, sacrificial love, demands in love that you become what you were made to be—and does this with the sweet, absolutely helpless cry of a newborn child. His very helplessness, like the poor of the world, the helpless, the [...]
I wonder whether the Benedict Option will be allowed by God. The problem for a lay monastic movement is that we laity are called to be salt and light in a fundamentally different way from monks and nuns. Salt does not do any good for the food when it is clumped together in a mass; [...]
It is hard, as a modern, to know the right questions to ask, to know when all questions fall silent in the presence of absolute Truth, of Revelation. In his final book, The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis writes about the Mediaeval world view: “All the apparent contradictions must be harmonised. A Model must be built which [...]
Christ is the essential picture of a true leader: one who is vulnerable, like a Lamb; one who is a servant, a person willing to be a sacrifice for the Good… The first true leader I experienced was my own father. He is not particularly articulate, and there are many people who know more about [...]
Christians who live so that they are never contaminated are useless, and they are liars, because we are all contaminated more seriously than we can imagine if we have ever seen a human soul as it was meant to be. When first a more serious, idealistic Christian, I didn’t think this was even a possibility. [...]
Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disc rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining [...]
Once I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a large book sitting on a table. Its cover was a detail photograph of a roof corner. I was caught immediately, like love at first sight. A detail of a roof was all it took to make me a life-long fan of Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, the [...]
Is rhetoric simply a fight, or is it part of a feast that is for the good of both the individual and the polis—as a feast is for the sustenance of ourselves, but more importantly, for the communion of a Body, of a community? Callicles says, “‘Too late for a share in the fight,’ so [...]
In Plato’s Republic, we find that there is one ‘natural’ or ‘healthy’ state based on justice, one kind of healthy, just soul, but there are many degenerate forms of state and soul (Rep.,445c). Because justice is the state of balance and virtue in which a soul, or a state, lives according to the Good, according to [...]
In the fifth century B.C., Athens and her allies were at war with Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesian War, made famous by the great historian Thucydides. In the first part of the war, Pericles, son of Xanthippus, was the leader of Athens; by all accounts, he was an able leader, not least because [...]
Of course, the real term is “The Benedict Option,” and it does not refer to our retired Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, but rather to St. Benedict of Nursia, who in the collapse of the Roman Empire fathered a way of living that kept Christian civilization alive: the monastic order. Oddly enough, like Benedict XVI, it [...]