The world is always at war with Christ and His Church, and the worldly within the Church are always in an unholy alliance with the world. The world is a vale of tears and a land of exile. There was no golden age and there will be no golden age of Christendom. How, then, might [...]
A friend of Christendom and of civilization in an age of decadence and barbarism, Hilaire Belloc thundered against the heresies of his age and defied the storms of war and secularism. Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) is not as well-known as he and his talent deserve. From the last years of the reign of Queen Victoria until [...]
Might the “big R” Reformation of the sixteenth century and the “big R” Revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth owe something to the first great revolution that made Old Europe in the first place? It has been noted that historians are creatures professionally invested in change. We should therefore suspect them when they speak of [...]
One of the greatest adventure stories in exploration history was a dismal failure. The ill-fated voyage of the ship Endurance never reached its destination. However, the story of its heroic captain, Sir Ernest Shackleton, survives as a stirring inspiration for all time. The 1914 expedition sought to be the first to cross Antarctica. It failed [...]
St. Augustine observed, “To begin with, there never has been, nor, is there today, any absence of hostile foreign powers to provoke war.” Evil men lusting after power—aggressors—are endemic to human history, and noted Augustine, “When they go to war what they want is to make, if they can, their enemies their own, and then [...]
St. Benedict found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time, or by any rare specific, or by any series of strokes, but [...]
It was in this age of ruin and distress that St. Augustine lived and worked. To the materialist, nothing could be more futile than the spectacle of Augustine busying himself with the reunion of the African Church and the refutation of the Pelagians, while civilisation was falling to pieces about his ears. It would seem [...]
Making judgments is a privilege of persons only. A privilege that is necessary, both to live well on earth and to enter Heaven. There are at least nineteen different kinds of judgment that we should distinguish. I’m sorry I could not find a twentieth, to match the number of digits on our fingers and toes. But [...]
In America today, the bewildering “what I want” faction topples statues, rewrites history, decolonizes curricula, detaches identities from ontological realities, indoctrinates our youth, and tries to impose its utopian totalitarianism. What we see unfolding in the world and in our country is war. It is the war that began for us when a woman listened [...]
The conventional narrative of “The Schism of 1054” may attract us by its simplicity and apparent explanatory power. But besides serving as a dubious justification for an ongoing situation, this narrative fails to capture the variety, obscurity, and complexity of human nature inspired by religious conviction that comes into view through the study of history [...]
“Patriarchy” is a word that has almost ceased to communicate a definable meaning in contemporary discourse. Feminist theory deploys the term so loosely that it may be applied to any institution or instance in which men dominate women or are perceived to do so. “Most feminist criticism,” Heather Jones avers, “tends to represent the family [...]
The admonitions of Byzantine’s unionists resonate well beyond the Fall of Constantinople—if we had but ears to hear them. Indeed, we today, standing amidst the threatened walls of the house of the West that was once known as Christendom must cherish a culture of Christian solidarity, the conviction that the City of God is and [...]
Like a queen who rides a bicycle, Tom Holland’s “Dominion” is both majestic and down-to-earth. From antiquity to modernity, Mr. Holland traces a sneaky thesis that Christianity has changed the world—transforming it from the inside out. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland (624 pages, Basic Books, 2019) Every once in [...]
England is even further from the Faith that forged her today than she was fifty years ago. She has forgotten her roots, or, if she hasn’t, she would like to forget. The problem is that the absence of Christ means the absence of goodness, truth, and beauty. A nation that rejects Christ is committing moral [...]