Lord, restore our hunger; revive our appetites that have gorged on the fake bread of disobedience, so that our hearts, like David’s, might sing to you with the new conviviality of the Bread of Life. Matthew 12: 1-8 shows us a dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees who spot the disciples plucking and eating ears [...]
“Since that night, I have a fire within me, which I cannot quench. I tried knowing God through reason. But now I must share the truth and the certainty that God has confirmed in my heart. I never thought a sense of peace and the passion of fire could reside in one’s heart simultaneously.” The [...]
As an English professor who has taught the Odyssey every semester for the last 35 years, along with a dozen or so film classes on Hitchcock, Capra, musicals, Hollywood studios, and film classics, I awaited the release of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey with great anticipation. Overall, I was impressed by the film and by Nolan’s fresh [...]
The doctrine of new creation is a treasure of our faith, one of our strengths, which sets us apart from other worldviews and philosophies throughout history and throughout the globe. We must not lose it, for it is the source of our hope in a God who creates, restores, and redeems—an active God who is [...]
That God's love is ever present to us is of no doubt. The question is, what are we doing to receive it? It is only by daily turning away from self-absorption that we can become absorbed in the love of God that is continually poured out upon us by his son, Jesus Christ. When going [...]
Let us make no mistake. The primary front in our battle in America today lies in our minds, and the most vulnerable minds are those of our children. We can take a stand. Our children can. They will take a stand, but only if we have the calm wisdom of those whose statues are being [...]
Socialism always and everywhere decays into outright abuse of the human person. Has there ever been a socialism that didn’t result in the establishment of a gulag, a holocaust camp, or a killing field? At age 58, I can state with utter earnestness that one of the most devastating things of our present age is [...]
In Mary’s body, we see the total gift of God’s grace in raising and glorifying our lowly bodies to that “lofty goal” unattainable by our own efforts. All the evil which eats up our bodies—our diseases, discomforts, lusts, and addictions—will be trampled upon not by abandoning the body, but by glorifying it. As a child, [...]
As the man pleaded his case, Father Maximilian Kolbe came forward and offered his life for the one pleading. The German commandant of Auschwitz—probably rather shocked—agreed, and Kolbe, with nine others, stripped naked and entered the concrete bunker. As Hillsdale students approach my desk on the fourth floor of Delp Hall, several things stand or [...]
Popping up all over the country are chapters of the Catholic Land Movement, which is a distributist-inspired and Chesterton-inspired attempt to revive the economic vision of Pope Leo XIII. Grounded in conversion and conviction, such a movement is growing. Is it time—or already past time—to consider something that was once called distributism as an alternative [...]
Not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven. We must depend utterly on Him in the process of putting to death our every act of self-seeking, which is always an act of self-exaltation. Matthew 23: 8-12 again presents us with a set of aphorisms of the Lord. You are not to [...]
Hans Urs von Balthasar wanted to see the Church as missionary, and to reassert the beauty of the mystery at the heart of the Christian message. He sought to reinvigorate religious life and the role of the laity by reintegrating beauty and mysticism in theology. Born on 12 August 1905 in Lucerne, Switzerland, to an [...]
Among the many characters who played a part in the assault on the citadels of Whig and Anglocentric history was one Malcolm Vivian Hay of Seaton, a Scottish laird, soldier, politician, independent scholar, and polymath. As many-sided as his several pursuits and vocations was the unlikely assembly of loyalties, religious and cultural, that Hay somehow [...]
With the publication of "An Ocean Full of Angels," Peter Kreeft is proving that he can emulate C.S. Lewis in writing great apologetic fiction, as well as non-fiction. Indeed, of all the novels written this century which I have read—and I have read many—this stands alongside the best. An Ocean Full of Angels, by Peter [...]