Romano Guardini reminds us, above all, to render “to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that are God’s.” His writings help us to recognize the spiritual necessity of not being slaves of the things of the world. His testimony thus pleads with us to disentangle ourselves from the enemies of [...]
As we recall the legacy of the late Benedict XVI, we would be remiss if we overlooked his theology of the saints as the antidote to the “dictatorship of relativism." One of the central ideas throughout the writings of Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) has been the notion of communio (“communion”), which sees God Himself as [...]
The pursuit of the truth as revealed in Jesus Christ, not the building of a philosophical or moral system, has animated the theology of Joseph Ratzinger from the beginning. For this reason, author Tracey Rowland concludes “that even though he is probably one of the most intellectual popes in history, for him Christianity is above [...]
C.S. Lewis described the medieval "cosmos" as “tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, a festival not a machine." The modern “universe,” he believed, is devoid of significance, and so we have to give a meaning to our own lives, by willpower if necessary. The old cosmos might not be a very useful map for space travelers, [...]
“Beauty will save the world.” That remains to be seen. But beauty has saved me, and continues to do so. My experience is that I need saving; it is not a luxury. Just when I am about to succumb to the sadness and living death of nihilism, some piercing ray of beauty breaks open my [...]
David L. Schindler was more than a towering intellect, more even than a mentor or an intellectual father. He was a great soul—a magnanimous man in the Aristotelean sense—generous, good, funny, alive, really larger than life. It is why he was so fiercely beloved by generations of students and why he affected so many lives [...]
Jesus makes becoming like children a condition for entrance into heaven and hence for the everlasting participation in divine life to which we are all invited. The human being is not only to begin as a child, as it were, but also to end as one. Liberal culture’s anti-child practices are bound up with a [...]
The evident chaos of the contemporary “cancel culture”—which is coming to resemble something like a cyber version of The Terror in late 18th-century France during which the revolutionaries began cutting off even their own heads—is due to an abuse of language. There is a profound sort of cultural suicide occurring in this phenomenon. We are [...]
The poor, Jesus famously said, will always be with us. Jesus’ followers have often been accused of misusing these words of their Master as an excuse to ignore the systemic causes of poverty. Christians, the charge runs, have preached private benevolence as a substitute for the more arduous, and more courageous, task of fighting to change [...]
Christ assumed the whole of humanity in his assumption of the individual human nature received from and through his mother Mary. Politics is about the final end of human existence, and so politics has an essential relation to the Christian claim. The claim cannot be avoided; it can only be affirmed or denied. When thinking [...]
Political correctness is philosophical nonsense. What we need is Justice not just Equality, Moral Responsibility not just Freedom, Intelligence not just Reason, and Charity not just Niceness or Fraternity—even if these don’t sound so good on a banner. Political correctness identifies a syndrome we all recognize, but is hard to define. It can be best [...]
In his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium [EG], Pope Francis insists that we need to anchor our approach to the Church’s missionary task in the Incarnate Word as the principle of reality (“il criterio di realtà”: 233). This principle can be a guide for “the development of life in society and the building of a people,” [...]
Granted that the right to religious freedom is founded in the dignity of the human person, on what does the dignity of the human person itself finally rest, and how does one’s conception of these foundations affect the nature of the right? Can one assert a civil right to religious freedom without thereby at least [...]
What is entailed by the original nature of the creature as gift? The crucial point is that the relation to God that establishes the creature in its own being, and indeed that implies a shared relation of each creature with all other creatures, is truly in the creature. What the creature most basically is, is [...]