Patience encourages us to accept humbly that we will not be as good as soon as we want to, due to being part of the fallen world. This understanding need not lead to despair, but rather to hope, for if we keep patiently at it, eventually we will look back on the struggle as well [...]
The literature of Robert Penn Warren and William Styron describes the decline of society, an annihilation of culture. It also projects a knowledge of the eternal struggle, forever bound by memory, and the inherent yearning for a civilization that “is the refuge of sentiments and values, of spiritual congeniality, of belief in the word, of [...]
Mary Ann Glendon has written a very diplomatic account of her service in the courts of three popes. It seems that nothing that she encountered necessarily surprised her, but she felt like a “stranger in a strange land,” at a time in history that Bishop Fulton Sheen not all that long ago labeled the “end [...]
Christ our Passover has been sacrificed; let us rejoice and be glad. But let us not suppose that our Passover, the sacrifice of our lives in union with his, is complete. In April of 2022, a few months before taking the Dominican habit, I walked around the Notre Dame campus with a Dominican friar. A [...]
Can we imagine that a good and loving God would allow the presence, in a world degraded due to human sin, of other rational beings who would have suffered, although innocent, its consequences? Formulated around 1950, the paradox bearing the name of Enrico Fermi was sparked by a rhetorical question: why haven’t we encountered intelligent [...]
Rosary College is the first-ever college in South Carolina to offer a tradition-oriented education in the Catholic tradition. Apart from offering affordable college-level education for local students, the college will also offer its courses online, enabling students to enroll from anywhere in the world. Father Dwight Longenecker needs no introduction to readers of The Imaginative [...]
Our modern urbanised arrangement of vast groups of human beings—in which the city is master and the country servant—organized through tokens (money) rather than through realities—are undeniably the proximate occasion of war. Old Principles and the New Order, by Vincent McNabb, O.P. (224 pages, Cluny Media) “Jesus…seeing the city wept over it saying: If thou [...]
The end of the scholar is not to be a scholar; but a man, doing that which cannot be done without scholarship. The end is never the production of a work of art, however grand in conception, successful in execution, or exquisite in finish; but the realization of a good to which art is subsidiary. [...]
A satirical comedy opens our eyes to ourselves and our society, and in laughing at our foibles, foolishness, and failures, we will also see the serious side, the dangerous implications of our idiocy. In Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, the character Betty Higden compliments her child Sloppy who reads the newspaper to her. She says, [...]
Tocqueville was not a philosopher in the classic sense; he thought of himself as unfortunate not to believe in the promises of the personal God of the Bible. He didn’t think he, as a thinker, had a natural right not to believe. I’m giving some comments in Boston in response to a great essay by [...]
In one of his last writings, Pope Benedict XVI afforded a key insight into the conservative ideal. Though he was writing as a Catholic about Catholic problems, the late pope’s reflections are truly universal. Speaking directly to the sexual abuse crisis that reached fever pitch during his pontificate, Benedict observes: “The crisis caused by the [...]
In making a case for the property rights of the American clergy, Bishop John Carroll made a revolutionary case for the nature of the American Church’s relationship with Rome. In these United States our Religious system has undergone a revolution, if possible, more extraordinary than our political one. —John Carroll, 1783 John Carroll and his fellow [...]
No survey of contemporary literature can call itself complete today which ignores Catholic literature. And this not only because of the promise it holds out for a complete renovation of the arts, but also because of its many distinguished writers and its not inconsiderable critical and creative work in all departments of literature. The Catholic [...]
One of the most astonishing aspects of the Incarnation mystery is that Christ, while being “God from God, Light from Light,” can withal be spoken of as a human being among human beings. In studying Jesus’ personality, background, concerns, and interests, we touch divinity itself, and learn something of divinity’s plan for humanity as expressed [...]