Catholic culture is, first and foremost, a society built upon a family whose identity draws from the Holy Family. In a culture where every contour of the public life assists in communicating the message of Jesus Christ, the first citizen of the realm will be the Church, she who is both Bride and Body of Christ, [...]
In “The Lord of the Rings,” the One Ring and the One Sin are symbolic similitudes. As the One Ring is “unmade” on Mount Doom, so the One Sin is “unmade” on the hill of Golgotha, the place of the skull. Therefore, if the Ring is synonymous with sin in general and Original Sin in [...]
In “Ash Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot repudiated his ironic style along with his despairing and nihilistic view of the world. When he wrote it, he was turning from the hell of the wasteland of unbelief to receive his ashes and begin his long Lent. T.S. Eliot’s secret baptism in 1927 marked one of the most remarkable [...]
While being the salt of the earth requires the Gift of Knowledge, being the light of the world requires the movements of the Gift of Counsel: the gift of knowing when and how to intervene, of when to echo the words of Jesus and when to emulate His silence. Matthew 5: 13-16 sees Jesus deliver [...]
Under what conditions is an aggressive war justified as punishment for a violation of the international order or as a redress for an injury suffered? Defensive war offers fewer problems. We have already pointed out that the justice of the cause of war must be certain for the public authority. Hence, the other party, in the dispute is [...]
Why do our lives happen this way or that? Are they meaningless? For four thousand winters Adam lay bound, bound by death, bound in death. So the medieval English hymn Adam lay ybounden has it. Not much is known about the hymn other than the parchment it is preserved on and speculations of its provenance. That is enough for our [...]
While Benedict XVI may not himself have made great contributions to the natural sciences, he made what is much more important: a contribution to understanding a world in which the truth is one, is God’s, and, from atoms to archangels, is capable of being seen as connected. A great deal has been written about the [...]
So, then, what is Christian Culture? What does it look like? Are there certain defining features that distinguish it from what passes for culture these days? And if so, how are we to recognize them? What it is, at the deepest level, is an answer to the question raised by the Hebrew psalmist in a [...]
Why doesn’t Jesus just try harder with the Nazarenes? To a great extent, the Lord’s choices in this moment are a mystery to us. Mark 6: 1-6 sees Jesus back in his hometown, preaching as He did elsewhere, but finding the people incredulous. After all, they knew Him, did they not? He was just Jesus, [...]
Having made known God’s will, Christ neither demands servile submission from us nor desires groveling self-abasement. He asks of us something far greater and costlier: “Will you follow me?” To riff on Tertullian – what has obedience to do with love? How does obedience to God show love for him? To our modern sensibilities, the two seem like [...]
A hero is someone you admire to the point of losing sleep over. A hero is one the ancients were tempted to worship, with the ardent hope that some of the strength from his dead body would seep into the ground and make their crops fertile. A hero, you admit, is better than you are, [...]
The Church is like an old schoolmaster, the schoolmaster of the centuries, and as such it has seen so many students pass before it, cultivate the same poses and fall into the same errors, that it merely smiles at those who believe that they have discovered a new truth. One of the catchwords which keeps [...]
We can only bloom where we are planted. So, our job as finite beings—rooted in the soil of this world while yet being summoned to an infinite and eternal destiny—is to provide the best possible soil: culture. How to account for the Good News of Jesus Christ? The short answer is the Holy Ghost, who, in [...]
John the Baptist comes not simply to know Jesus – He knows He is the Messiah – but to know what that means, to know something more of the depths of that mystery of who He actually is; to be initiated further into that knowledge that Jesus says is the essence of the eternal life. [...]