We love God, follow the reason implicit in sexual nature, and consider having children the greatest privilege bestowed on us, the greatest of gifts. Each child is a huge promise, a new world aborning, and I cannot imagine a financial anxiety so serious that it would make anyone think otherwise. In one of the customs [...]
The season of Lent is superimposed upon the life of work that we already lead, but here, more than ever, the pressing need is for silence, renunciation, and the leisure of deep work in prayer and spiritual reflection, achieved without deadlines or anxiety. Back before the students returned to Wyoming Catholic College this semester, I [...]
Persuasion is not an antiquated art for a lost era. In a time of base language and tweets, social media and the hive mind of the internet, it makes sense to study the principles of oral rhetoric and to understand effective and responsible appeal to an audience. A strange madness descended this week upon Lander, [...]
Simply speaking, literature works with the mode of thought most natural to the human mind—that is, thinking in images, comparisons, characters, speeches, and actions. Every household of parents and children has a cast of distinct characters whose various performances become stories in the family. Our five-year-old grandson Andrew, for example, though a domestic terrorist by [...]
In the current battle for the classroom between traditional literature and overt propaganda, #DisruptTexts and its allies attack Shakespeare for hate speech. But is Shakespeare promulgating hateful rhetoric? Or is he thinking deeply into the dramatic situation of racial and religious conflict in the Mediterranean world to reveal the human heart in conflict with itself? [...]
Even without the content of the general historical frame, William Wordsworth’s sonnet, “London 1802,” is moving to every generation that reads it, and it is natural to compare our current political situation with the one described in the poem. All of us, of course, remember the dire circumstances of England in 1802. No? Then we [...]
Turning away from the news and attending with imagination to the “Oresteia” takes faith, both in God and in the wisdom of our forebears. This will be a worthier endeavor, both for the present moment and for the time to come, than trying to tear down the very structures that give us the promise of [...]
Against the backdrop of angels and gods, Jew and Greek, comes the humble birth in Bethlehem. This most momentous intervention is God’s incarnation. God is the newborn mortal child wholly dependent on others to shelter and nourish him. He is also, at the same time, the ageless and immortal God on Whom all creation depends. [...]
In these uncertain times, we are constantly being urged to historicize Christ, as though He were merely a symbolic figure in a moribund and culturally discredited system of thought. But Advent reminds us of the deep promise of the Nicene Creed. He was, He is, and He is to come. In this Advent, we await [...]
The story of the Indian Wars for the American West in Peter Cozzens’s “The Earth Is Weeping” contains the tragic patterns of all human history. This history, like all real history, lives once we awaken memory and see the real contours of what lies before us. One of the compensations for long hours in the [...]
The word for truth in Greek means the absence of forgetting—the sudden recollection, the vivid recovery. In the great tradition of the West, when those who study it retrieve immense and priceless knowledge from forgetfulness, we find the hope of renewal. As we approach Thanksgiving this year, the coronavirus phenomenon helps us value rightly what [...]
For most of our veterans, it should go without saying that military discipline and experience give them a moral authority. It is a recognition—once universal—that is too often forgotten in an age when patriotism itself seems suspect to many. On this day when we honor our veterans, it’s good to recollect both the debt of [...]
Editorializing in news stories, once verboten, has now become de rigueur. Journalism, never perfect at any moment of its history, but full of aspiration to be objective and balanced, has now conceded entirely to Nietzsche’s critique of empiricism: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Many years ago, in an earlier contentious era of American politics, [...]
Refusing to dwell upon the “subjunctive abyss”—that bottomless, tormenting sense of what has been denied or taken away—Eumaios the swineherd gives his energies to what he can do and do well. He practices virtue on his own with no one else to enforce it and reminds the wandering Odysseus what real nobility is. Whatever I [...]