Gospel Reflection

The Last Infinity

Is it worth it to try to do great things in business or politics or art or education—or even the Church? Recently, when I was reflecting on honor and fame as praiseworthy ambitions for...

The Humility of Mary

From the Annunciation to the Presentation, from the Wedding at Cana to the upper room in Acts 1 and 2, the Mother of God's life is undergirded and infused with humility... About a year before being received into...

Christianity and Progress

Although Christians cannot be above the fray because we are part of it—called and commanded to love our neighbours, and even our enemies—we are nonetheless beyond the fray in the sense that we are called to something beyond it...

Movies, Myth, and History

What shall we make of filmmakers who twist history for propaganda purposes? In an extreme way, they are doing what all historians do: They are not only recording history, they are also interpreting it—and can history be done without interpreting the facts?...

Elgar, Enigma, and Easter

Easter likely hadn’t been on Edward Elgar’s mind when he wrote his Enigma Variations, yet this wondrous, utterly memorable piece conjures up a rush of powerful spirituality, a sense of Easter Sunday grandeur. It is most decidedly “death has been conquered; arise and go forth” music...

The Risen Christ and Fallen Civilization

With eyes wide open to the degradation we see all around us, we know that things are rotten in the modern world. Who can deny it? And yet there are more Christians in the world today than there have ever been in the past. The Church is...

The Reality of the Resurrection

Too often we Christians have given in to the temptation to sanitize the crucifixion and sentimentalize the resurrection. But the resurrection was not, at first, a cause for rejoicing, but the source of fear—soul-shaking, knee-knocking, heart-pounding, earth-quaking fear...

The Harrowing of Hell

Christ descended into hell to deliver His loved ones from their exile. He came to reward those who, from our first father, Adam, to His own foster-father, St. Joseph, had fought the good fight and had finished the race...

The Way of the Cross: Two Sonnets

IV Jesus meets His Mother This darker path into the heart of pain Was also hers whose love enfolded him In flesh and wove him in her womb. Again The sword...

The Brilliant Darkness of a Friday Afternoon

Not only did Jesus manifest Himself as the Logos so long desired in the pagan West on that Friday afternoon, but He also manifested Himself as the Christ, the true and eternal king. In some mysterious way, it was the death on Friday that revealed all of...

John with Jesus: From Passover to the Garden of Gethsemane

I went with Peter to make the arrangements for the Passover supper. When we arrived in Jerusalem, Jesus had told us to look for a man carrying a pitcher of water. We were to follow him into the...

Reflections on Christ and the Classics

In a certain way, Christ is both priest and offering, a self-sacrifice transcending both concepts. This is something the classical world found disquieting... The extent to which the pagan classical world and Christianity are able to tell...

Awaiting the King: Developing a Christian Imagination

The church needs to ensure it is offering the true account of reality, rather than the account that the world is offering. That account, expressed through liturgy and worship, will form the Christian political imagination... Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology by James K.A....

Temperance & Abundance: Romano Guardini’s “Letters from Lake Como”

When we begin to refashion things in our image rather than in God’s, we ourselves become displaced and disjointed. Strangely enough, by asserting only our humanity, we lose what makes us essentially and beautifully human... In truth, nature begins to relate to us only when we...