The Catholic Church canonized Saints Thomas More and John Fisher in 1935, only two years after the appearance of "The English Way," a work edited by one of the most important Christian humanists and publishers of the twentieth century, Maisie Ward, and which looks at the lives, ideas, and deaths of the great Roman Catholic [...]
Poetry and prayer provide something artificial intelligence can never produce—the vital connection between the reality of the physical world and the greater reality of the unseen world. A poem, like a prayer, is the human soul reaching out with words to the wordless. Our middle son explained how artificial intelligence could help him work as [...]
Something is stirring underground. Something exciting. Something new. Something invigorating. Refreshing. Needed. The something to which I refer is a new Catholic cultural revival, which is being made manifest in the visual arts, music and most especially in literature. Last week, in the first of these “notes from underground”, I focused on murder mysteries being [...]
Both Roger Scruton and Yoram Hazony argue that the nation-state has its virtues. In the current “global conflict,” Scruton urged, “the nation is one of the things that we must keep." Sir Roger Scruton wrote of a “turning point in our history”[1], and this turning point was about the nation. Scruton believed that the “greatest [...]
In his day, Harry Sylvester was viewed as an important Catholic literary voice—a fine writer and a sharp observer, whose description is often precise, poetic, and powerful. But because he focused on contemporary cultural and social concerns instead of the faith itself, he automatically dated his work and destined it to be forgotten. Helping in [...]
Today, in the real-life web of deceit, depravity, and diabolical darkness in which we find ourselves, good and healthy murder mysteries can inoculate the soul of the reader from the toxic mainstream. They help to expose the crimes of the culture of death, serving as undercover agents in the countercultural underground. The culture of death [...]
Saul Bellow's protagonist Artur Sammler is both witness and survivor to the central event in his own time: the attempt on the part of Hitler and his henchmen to eradicate European Jewry. But even though the novel takes place in a different time and place, behind those contemporary times are the ghosts from that World [...]
Daniel McInerny's "Beauty and Imitation" seeks to retrieve, with the philosophical aid principally of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, the pre-modern understanding of art as imitation of the beautiful forms that make up sacred order. Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflections on the Arts, by Daniel McInerny (448 pages, Word on Fire Academic, 2024) Once [...]
The psalms of the Old Testament remain the prayer of the New. By their bringing together and by their lyrical exaltation of all the clearly marked themes included in revelation from the beginning, the psalms are the providential means to aid us in discerning the abiding reality of the Word. The Bible and the Gospel, [...]
Together, the corrupting sins of pride and envy destroyed the democracies of ancient Athens and Rome. But what lies at the root of these two greatest of sins? And is there any remedy or antidote that can cure us, and our society, once we give way to them? Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s “Immortal Combat” offers answers. [...]
Fareed Zakaria’s book is a defense of liberalism in the European sense of a regime of limited government, free markets, rule of law, moral indifference, maximized freedom, and unending progress. He turns all those who support the conservative cause into resentful, racist individuals left behind by progress. Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 [...]
G.K. Chesterton was one of the very greatest men of his time. He will almost certainly be remembered as a great and solitary figure in literature, an artist in words and ideas with an astonishing fecundity of imaginative vision. He will almost certainly be remembered as a prophet in an age of false prophets. Occasional [...]
Joseph Pearce’s “C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church” presents a compelling case in suggesting that its subject evolved “into a very Catholic sort of Protestant.” Though C.S. Lewis never became a Roman Catholic, his later works betray a growing affinity for Catholic teaching. C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, by Joseph Pearce (220 pages, [...]
Not just as a Protestant, but as an American, I am not used to having history presented to me from a Catholic point of view. Here are four things Joseph Pearce's "The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful" taught me, and can teach Christians of all denominations, particularly evangelicals. The Good, the Bad, and the [...]