Just as any great ball players should study the form and technique of past athletes, so every Christian, and especially every minister commissioned to preach the Word, should study the Fathers of the Church. We can spend time in their company through their writings. The Power of Patristic Preaching: The Word in Our Flesh, by [...]
I have always been a keen walker, or “hiker” in the American idiom. I have ambled, rambled, scrambled or otherwise perambulated across large swathes of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; I have roamed around Europe; and I have even ventured, since my arrival on this side of the Pond fourteen years ago, to traipse through [...]
The Great Tradition patiently endures, ready to speak on its own behalf, ready to challenge narrow prejudices, ready to examine those with the courage to be interrogated by it, ready to teach those who are willing to be made unfit for the modern world. The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be [...]
Friedrich Nietzsche's is a Messianic view, but devoid of God, regarding Superman both as saviour and saved. His concept led to the justification of violence, cruelty, the worst inequality of human conditions, and even slavery. There has been in our age no more complete embodiment of the satanic rebellion. The Church of the Revolutionary Age: [...]
Robin Hood's legend lives on as a model for all who try to serve God when government, the rich, and, all too often, those vowed to God’s service explicitly are fighting against us. The Adventures of Robin Hood by Roger Lancelyn Green, illustrations by Arthur Hall (Puffin Books, 2010, 294 pages) The most difficult conflicts [...]
One comes away from reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's book wishing that she might have expressed a doubt or two about the efficacy of this or that New Frontier/Great Society domestic initiative. But it is clear that the author has no doubts about the goodness of her country. An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of [...]
Trevor Colbourn considers the Declaration of Independence the highest expression of Anglo-Saxon thought and liberty. Not only did it draw upon the Whig traditions of natural rights and common law, but it identified the king as a traitor to his own office. The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American [...]
Liberty is not the right to do whatever I please, nor is liberty the necessity of doing whatever the dictator dictates; rather liberty is the right to do what I ought. Furthermore, “ought” is intrinsically related to purpose. The best way of finding out why a thing was made is to go to its maker. [...]
What is the focus of a Catholic vision of renewal for education? Rather than “classical,” our focus should be on the Christian tradition following the Church’s own educational vision. The goal should be to teach from a Catholic worldview, rooted within the great Catholic heritage of thought and culture. Words Made Flesh: The Sacramental Mission [...]
Paul T. Mascia's novella, "Nazar’s Journey," is full of hope, and yet it is set in the midst of one of the grimmest and deadliest episodes in recent history, in which it would have been very easy for people to lose all hope. Nazar's Journey, by Paul T. Mascia (Austin Macauley Publishers, 2024, 141 pages) [...]
While Texas secession would indeed mean that it was no longer one of the states in the union, author T.L. Hulsey has bigger fish to fry than merely separating Texas from California, Minnesota, and New York. What he wants is to start again as the Founders did, but better. The Constitution of Non-State Government: Field [...]
Our civilization has danced on the edge of the volcano for so many years now, recklessly testing its footing in ever more vulgar and precarious ways, defying the moral interdictions of the past and gradually losing a sense of its own fragility and vulnerability, that it is hard to imagine that we will survive our [...]
I think a niche market remains for Catholic fiction, but it is more likely to be fiction that confirms and consolidates the Catholic worldview: stories with Catholic heroes who challenge and subvert the secular order and suffer for it. American murder mysteries invariably involve a grubby gumshoe working out of a beat-up office with a [...]
"Women of the Catholic Imagination" highlights Catholic novelists whose perspective is expressly female, not because they wrote about women’s issues, but because the writers are women. The stories are not about Catholic things, but are Catholic because the authors have a Catholic world view, which can’t help but permeate their works. It never ceases to [...]