John Henry Newman was born in 1801, at the beginning of a century that would see the rise of skepticism in matters of religion. Yet, simultaneously, it was a century which would see a real revival of religious orthodoxy. With respect to the latter, Newman himself might be seen as the most important and influential [...]
"The Blithedale Romance" conveys Nathaniel Hawthorne’s disillusionment with Brook Farm, Transcendentalism, reform movements, and the quest for individual and social perfection. I. Published in 1852, The Blithedale Romance offers Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most trenchant criticism of America.[i] Unlike his more optimistic contemporaries who imagined the advance toward individual and social perfection in the United States, Hawthorne [...]
Understood properly, October purges us of our follies and reminds us that death hovers just in front of us. It reminds us that we always stand in time, but at the very edge of eternity. The autumnal coolness—just on the edge of the dying summer—is in the air, and it feels good. Very cool, very [...]
Each of us, in the face of an atrocity, can only pray to the Madonna with the Sword-Pierced Heart, seeking the mercy of her Son for sinful humanity and seeking to share in her sorrow for those innocent victims of man’s inhumanity to man. And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and [...]
Who would have thought that a teacher might convince a student that living a virtuous life was both a challenge and an adventure? David Hein apparently has done just that in the classroom, and those classroom teachers who read his book might well come to learn from him and agree with him—and do the same [...]
The traditional liturgy may be a surprising magnet for disparate groups to be united because it is so ancient. It transcends culture because of both its antiquity and its ubiquity. It also transcends personal taste and cultural fashions. When I was a student at Oxford, my parents came to visit, and on her first venture [...]
Booker T. Washington did not call for a revolution. Instead, he called for the simplest of building blocks in American society: helping your neighbor. I reread an undergraduate paper comparing the educational methods of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois and realized the comparison was horribly incomplete. I cited only Of the Training of Black [...]
Jesus did not preach an escape from earth to an immaterial Heaven. Rather, he preached the coming of God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven,” a redemption of God’s good creation. We hope in the completion of God’s grand rescue project, which is taking shape as we speak and which will reach fulfillment [...]
If we are to recover “the moral ideal” and if we are to be reconsecrated to the life of the spirit, we are in urgent need of an unconditional conservatism: lean, ascetical, disciplined, prophetic, unswerving in its censorial task, strenuous in its mission, strong in its faith, faithful in its dogma, pure in its metaphysic. [...]
Today in America, people of faith are binding up the unraveled fabric of civil society in tangible ways. We hold the threads individually, but when they are bound together, we can reweave a picture of order and beauty in human souls, woven in the vibrant colors of love. People of faith have given our culture [...]
Five-hundred years on from the Protestant revolution and Christendom is not just dismantled, but in full apostasy. Can it be revived, and if so, how? St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who was the greatest Christian philosopher of antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence, maintained that a Christian state is the only [...]
David Horowitz has been an unrelenting fighter and a happy warrior, and has had his fair share of tribulations. But never has he succumbed to a sense of victimhood. There were always too many good people to appreciate, and when he was young, a world to save, and as he grew older and wiser, warnings [...]
Why would Christoph Schönborn—a Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church and a theologian who specialized in Patristic studies—dedicate so many essays and conferences to a doctrine that appears to overlook the Christian faith? Theology in The New York Times In the context of the debates caused by the “Intelligent Design” movement, an important Catholic contribution [...]
E.E. Cummings’ attitude to dogma and formal religion may have remained skeptical, but true to his Unitarian roots, he retained respect for spirituality and a simple reverence towards the Almighty. Echoing the transcendentalism of Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau, Cummings bursts forth with simple, lyrical praise for God and nature. What shall we make of Edward [...]