The body in its physical structure as such bears a vision of reality: it is an anticipatory sign, and already an expression, of the order of love or gift that most deeply characterizes the meaning of the person and indeed, via an adequately conceived analogy, the meaning of all creaturely being. This is the burden [...]
Even when addressing non-Christians, Christian humanism’s willing receptiveness of the supernatural opens itself to the truths of revelation and of the human religious experience, allowing it to speak intimately and truthfully to the whole person… The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History by Lee Oser (University of Missouri Press, [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Jeremy Beer as he explores the philosophy of David Schindler, especially as it concerns love and freedom. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher For the orthodox Christian, is doing one’s public duty more or less reducible to voting for the most socially conservative [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Tracey Rowland as she examines the dangers to the family if political leaders are allowed to act as God. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher When the Obama Administration began its Kulturkampf against American Catholics, my husband suggested to me that if the [...]
Childlikeness, as both the beginning and the end of our creaturely way of being, is the key to being effective and realistic in efforts to renew the world, and indeed is the grounds for never-failing hope in these efforts. Liberal culture’s anti-child practices are bound up with a logic of childlessness most basically defined in [...]
Love is the basic act and order of all things because all things are created by God. The most basic fact or truth of all things is at once their analogically conceived goodness or value as gift, a giftedness that is intrinsic to each thing by virtue of its being generated by the generosity of [...]
During the infamous Brixton Riots of 1981—clashes between the police and the African-Caribbean community in south London—I was driving back to my parents’ house at night and got lost in the fog. I found myself faced with a dramatic scene: the fog illuminated by fire, as the rioters overturned cars and set them alight. I [...]
If we reconstruct J.R.R. Tolkien’s reading of Genesis from the opening pages of The Silmarillion, then, on Tolkien’s interpretation, only days four through six involve the actualization of material existence, whereas the first three days concern creation in an immaterial realm. Stratford Caldecott notes three correspondences between Genesis and Tolkien’s myth: between heaven and the [...]
Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” is becoming better and better known among ordinary Catholics, many of whom have found in it a way of connecting the central mysteries of the Christian faith—Trinity, Incarnation, and Eucharist—with their marriages, their bearing and rearing of children, and their sexuality. To such Catholics, the theology of [...]
If a prophet is not without honor save in his own country, a great prophet is not without honor save in the whole world. Pope Benedict XVI bent under that mantle in 2006 when he spoke in Regensburg. His only miscalculation was to assume that civilization might still be civil enough to respect reason. There [...]
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI almost a year after the June 2004 death of Ronald Reagan. I don’t know if Ratzinger and Reagan ever met, though there’s a chance they did during one of Reagan’s visits to the Vatican to meet with Pope John Paul II, especially his first and most prominent visit, [...]
The key to the Bible is surely to be found at its very heart, in the center that holds all things together. The Song of Songs is the center of the Wisdom literature, the center of the Bible. It struck me that the key to the Bible is surely to be found at its very [...]
As the author of two books laying out a new Catholic philosophy of education based on the traditional liberal arts (Beauty in the Word and Beauty for Truth’s Sake), I have mixed feelings about the Common Core. The Common Core grew out of a report on American education called “Ready or Not: Creating a High [...]
“I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one [...]