Is our nation witnessing a soft form of religious persecution beneath the cloak of public health? I pray and hope that this is not the case and that governments, preventing the free exercise of religion, will reverse course and allow church leaders to reopen their doors to once again proceed with the most essential task [...]
Heaven knows why, but on Easter Sunday 2020 I thought back to a conversation I had with Christopher Hitchens. I’d invited him to come to the Hauenstein Center to talk about his recent book on Thomas Jefferson. It was October 3, 2006. On the two-hour drive from Detroit Metro Airport to Grand Rapids, he mentioned [...]
The end of history concept—the belief that there will be an endpoint to social, intellectual, and political progress—is a powerful idea that pervades modern-day secular thought. The spread of gay rights, the rise of universal government-run health insurance, and environmental awareness has hubristically led “progressive” secularists to describe a coming “Age of Enlightenment” when Americans [...]
The Catholic order of nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor, are apparently not little enough or poor enough to avoid governmental coercion and interference with their works of charity. For almost a decade now, they have been involved in court cases resisting governmental attempts, first federal and now state, to require them to incorporate [...]
Within Thy wounds hide me. Anima Christi Anonymous, 14th century Lo: Gethsemane; as well, its vintage consecrated by His transformative Passion’s dramaturgy—abrogative, not regenerative, for the mintage of stigmata imprints Caesar’s coinage indelibly. But what is God’s to give […]
As our physical and political freedoms are increasingly curtailed by Leviathan due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we are hopefully becoming more aware of the value of what we are losing. Hopefully, it will be the occasion for a more urgent and honest reflection on the true meaning of freedom. Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character [...]
Easter’s supposed pre-Christian spring ritual roots are an opportunity to make the feast simply about bunnies, spring flowers, and eggs—all signs of spring without any of that obnoxious cross or empty tomb nonsense. Yet, the idea that Christians added Christ to a pre-existing Easter is standing on incredibly shaky ground. It is a well-known element [...]
The victory of Christ on the Cross was not a victory of sunshine, happy thoughts, and rainbows. Nay, it was a victory of sublime splendor. It was horrifying. It was total. It was—and remains—through the eyes of faith, also beautiful. St. Paul says that he is determined to know, and preach, nothing but “Christ and [...]
The Invention of Science by David Wootton is a dense, thought-provoking, and encyclopedic account of the Scientific Revolution. The book is an intellectual history, focusing mainly on the mental paradigm shift that the Revolution brought to Western Civilization. How man thinks about the natural world post-Revolution is not the same as how man thought before it, [...]
The imagination allows the human experience to be of both motion and stability, both becoming and being—but could it be that contained in our experience of time is an experience of divine nature? In his Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius writes that “the infinite motion of temporal things tries to imitate the ever present immobility of [...]
Like all human beings, the atheist ones I’ve seen and known are always prattling on about justice and injustice. But atheists don’t seem to realize that there is such a category as “should” because there is a design for the world that we perceive. Atheists do not believe in God, but I confess that I [...]
The admonitions of Byzantine’s unionists resonate well beyond the Fall of Constantinople—if we had but ears to hear them. Indeed, we today, standing amidst the threatened walls of the house of the West that was once known as Christendom must cherish a culture of Christian solidarity, the conviction that the City of God is and [...]
Like a queen who rides a bicycle, Tom Holland’s “Dominion” is both majestic and down-to-earth. From antiquity to modernity, Mr. Holland traces a sneaky thesis that Christianity has changed the world—transforming it from the inside out. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland (624 pages, Basic Books, 2019) Every once in [...]
There are dark corners to be explored in a great church. Instead of vast seating space, bright with electric light, huge speakers hanging from the beams, and padded pews, give me the darkened chapel where ancient monks recited their daily prayers. Give me the dark corner of a crumbling cloister, the dark corner of a [...]