Jesus makes becoming like children a condition for entrance into heaven and hence for the everlasting participation in divine life to which we are all invited. The human being is not only to begin as a child, as it were, but also to end as one. Liberal culture’s anti-child practices are bound up with a [...]
This is a quirky list. I sit here with tattered old books, some new ones, and my Kindle, and love them all; and offer ten that I have read in the years since my retirement from full-time teaching. Each has given me joy, and each speaks to what Brad Birzer calls the “human condition.” Booth [...]
St. Benedict of Norcia, with his life and his work, had a fundamental influence on the development of European civilization and culture. The most important source on Benedict’s life is the second book of St. Gregory the Great’s “Dialogues,” in which he gives us a model for human life in the climb towards the summit [...]
Present in all love is the love that God has for each of His creatures. In loving our neighbor, even the worst sinner, we love what God loves in him. But God’s love for us includes a final judgment about our lives... “Hell is the place God created for the angels who rebelled against him. [...]
Our civilization needs zealous and dedicated young men and women to convert the barbarians. However, because the barbaric culture is pervasive, we are all barbarians now to a certain extent, and thus, we must first civilize our own souls… Nowadays the devil has made such a mess of everything in the system of life on [...]
I’ve not been fully sure what to “make” of Pope Francis. He is clearly a man of God with a deep love for the poor and an even deeper personal humility. But how is one to respond to his pronouncements on economic and environmental issues? Pope Francis and the Caring Society, ed. Robert M. Whaples (Independent [...]
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, [...]
Those whose intellectual heritage lies in the Enlightenment find in the contemporary world the furthest reach of an inexorable progress against forces of primitive and reactionary religious belief. What is “religious liberty” to them but a sanction for oppression?… Rod Dreher’s new book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, is [...]
Liquidation does not mean punishment, subjugation, conquest, or even execution. Liquidation means extermination merely on the basis of otherness…. ‘Whoever is different will be liquidated,’ works like a poison, a constant temptation to human thought, destroying or at least menacing it. —Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues One of the most distinctive and, I would [...]
In our year-long course on music at Wyoming Catholic College, students read and discuss a chapter from Joseph Ratzinger’s book A New Song for the Lord, “The Image of the World and of Human Beings in the Liturgy and Its Expression in Church Music,”[1] one of the best things ever written about church music. Ratzinger masterfully [...]
These are troubling times. Europe is apparently on the verge of meltdown. Unable to withstand the heat caused by the growing friction between the European Union and its member states, especially as the former tries to force an open-door immigration policy on its subject nations, there are fears that the melting pot might be melting. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]