Peter Giersch's "Talking of Michelangelo" is an account of his trip to a French monastery to plunge into a week-long Ignatian retreat. But who wants to read about the inner musings of someone’s religious retreat? Happily, the most likely answer is: You do. Peter Giersch has been a French teacher, a catechist, a business entrepreneur [...]
Your very hands, once folded peacefully beneath the earth, will once again be vigorously poised up high to the praise of God. And in that eternal moment of sharing God’s perfect victory, we can even enjoy a most glorious high five with our triumphant Savior, our Lord, and our friend. After straining your whole being [...]
There are within all of us innumerable drives and urges that if allowed to rule would destroy us. If we are not consciously and daily engaged in the spiritual combat that calls upon us to act selflessly, then we will be unable to admit the New Man which is Christ, so that he can do [...]
If a democracy drifts into unlimited notions of freedom, the best course of action is not to strip citizens of freedom, but rather to educate them, so that they can correct any constitutional abuses that contributed or led the way to the abyss of nihilism. Introduction This essay will revisit the age-old concern with the [...]
The truth is that philosophy is not the apanage of the few. All may be equipped with the science of living, and one cannot be so equipped without a right, if inadequate, knowledge of the nature of things—at least, that is, of their nature as affecting human conduct. One who knows the ten commandments and [...]
For Christopher Dawson, there was the inflection point, the point of intersection where the enfleshment of God took place to fire the historical imagination. There could be no other event, no possible happening in the great sea of history to compare with the coming of God among us, pitching His tent in the midst of our [...]
Everything needed for evil to conquer was overthrown on Easter morning; of that there is no doubt. But every individual must live that conflict in themselves, even now. Matt 28: 8-15 tells us something about the power of a garden. The women emerged amazed from the tomb and started to run to tell the disciples [...]
Jesus retaining his wounds teaches us that the wounds we endure are not condemnations from a shameful past, but are the means by which God brings us to heaven. “Wait… his hand is in him!?” cried the boy. Kids were screaming, markers were flying, little girls were pretending to faint, all at the sight of this [...]
The sacrifice of Christ was totally effective. It could not be otherwise, given that He Who offered it was God. But it is important to grasp what it effected. Whatever it was meant to effect, it did effect. But what was it? At the moment of His death on Calvary, Christ Our Lord said, “It [...]
Several years ago, when I was in Europe leading a pilgrimage tour to England with Joseph Pearce, I learned that the Shroud of Turin was to be on display for veneration in Turin. After the pilgrimage in England I made my way to Italy where I was joined by a friend. After a few days [...]
God searches for every soul like the Lover searches for his Beloved in the Garden. The soul of the believer is the beautiful daughter, lovely like Jerusalem. As God walked in paradise with Adam, so he now dwells in the believer through grace. Before I entered the Order, I had the privilege of spending an [...]
The only question that matters is this: Is the Church to give the world a Christian shape, or must she instead shape Christianity to the world? Everything turns on the answer we give to that question. As often happens with the most portentous and far-reaching events, the learned and the clever will be the last to [...]
Guiding the reader through the seven-week Easter season, Laura Bedingfeld's "Arise" offers daily meditations from Sacred Scripture, showing how the theme of resurrection is woven through the great saga of salvation history from the beginning. There are plenty of devotional aids produced for the penitential seasons of Advent and Lent, but not enough for the [...]
Glenn W. Olsen’s "The Turn to Transcendence" is a must-read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death, and replace it with the only alternative: a civilization of love turned to the Face of Transcendence revealed in Jesus Christ. The Turn to Transcendence: The Role of Religion in the [...]