Glenn W. Olsen’s "The Turn to Transcendence" is a must-read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death, and replace it with the only alternative: a civilization of love turned to the Face of Transcendence revealed in Jesus Christ. The Turn to Transcendence: The Role of Religion in the [...]
Irenaeus’s doctrine of divine pedagogy has definite application to the intellectual and spiritual life: It sets the tone for a lifestyle of quiet, patient growth in knowledge, through prayer and learning at the feet of the Lord. “Behold, I make all things new.” (Revelation 21:5) St. Irenaeus of Lyons is one of the major Christian [...]
For those doing all right by themselves like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, Christ’s Resurrection from the dead throws everything off balance because it introduces something entirely new. To believe the testimony of the Gospels opens avenues to happiness that are entirely discomfiting to the complacency of mere identity. Flannery O’Connor had a way of compressing whole [...]
St Mary Magdalen came very early to the tomb on Easter Morning. There is something crucial in the timing: it was still dark. Mary at this point was still going through a trial that had started with Jesus' arrest. She had very little to sustain her, knowing only the destruction of her Master's body on the [...]
"The Lord of the Rings" is not an allegorical story, nor should it be treated as such, but that does not mean that the story cannot be used to contemplate and plumb the depths of humanity and its relation to the divine. That J.R.R. Tolkien had a great dislike for his works being called “allegories” [...]
The Resurrection means nothing if it doesn’t mean that we, too, will be raised from the dead in body and soul by Christ’s power. Tucked away in a dusty valley in the South of France, in the hill country that slopes up from the Mediterranean, there shines in the darkness of a medieval church a [...]
What are we to make of the Christian who says: “I am not so naïve or literal in my understanding as to expect Jesus physically to rise from the dead. Surely the true meaning of this belief is that he continued to exist in some spiritual manner”? Some years ago there was an Anglican bishop [...]
We must not invest in the transient things of this world, the very worst of investments, but in the everlasting things of heaven. If we fight the long defeat with the things of heaven in mind, we will attain the final victory. It is this final victory that represents, for each of us, the final [...]
Holy Saturday, nestled between two days of such great weight, gives us a chance to ponder the extent of God’s saving plan. Christ descended to the bowels of the earth so that he could bring us up from the pit of sin. When we find ourselves in an abyss of sinfulness, we need not despair: [...]
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 second reading from the Office of Readings for Holy Saturday is taken from an ancient homily on Christ’s [...]
The Blessed Virgin did not leave the Temple without shedding many tears. She thought over the destruction of the Temple of the Body of Jesus which had been brought about by his enemies, and she sighed with a longing desire for the dawning of that third day when the words of eternal truth were to [...]
“Behold the wood of the cross on which hung the salvation of the world.” When we hear the priest proclaim these words at the liturgy later today, perhaps we should also recall the annual proclamation of our optometrists. Gesturing toward yet another set of letters on the wall, he asks: “Now, what do you see here?” [...]
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 this, not the resurrection on Sunday. As Jesus [...]
The “Seven Last Words of Christ” can seen as the verbal expression of an interior reality: namely, the mind of Christ, as formed according to a deeply ingrained, habitual life practice of living mindfully according to the Lord’s Prayer. Holy Week is an especially fruitful time for prayerful meditation. There are many liturgical events at [...]