Any attempt to interpret history as a whole, if it is not to succumb to gnostic myth, must posit some subject which works in and reveals itself in the whole of history and which is at the same time [the belief in] a being capable of providing general norms. —Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar, A [...]
Whether they be fairies, gnomes, cryptids, aliens, or elves, what are these creatures about which man has written for centuries? C.S. Lewis explained that the medieval mind understood them to be inhabitants of a kind of middle realm between the physical and the spiritual regions. But is this "Middle Earth" real? No matter our chosen [...]
American culture has an opportunity now for renewal through its people of faith. We are being called to care for one another with love. We are being called to live out our virtue in service. The American soul has withered, and awaits an infusion of the lifeblood of love. Whether or not we respond may [...]
Just as the Catholic Faith has been reduced to little more than an intellectual philosophy of life for the clergy—all head and no heart—the same happened to the laity, who depend on them for their spirituality. In the immediate aftermath of the Council of Trent, Catholic spirituality, in both theory and practice, reached a height never [...]
We have increasingly placed our faith in the power of government to provide solutions for human misery. What was once a strong level of responsibility and autonomy at the city, county, and state level has shifted toward a massive concentration at the federal level. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he marveled [...]
An increasingly heated debate is taking place in America to redefine the role of faith in the public square. Faith has been a part of the American experience since the earliest days of the founding. As the nation now considers the relationship of the sacred and the secular, it may be helpful to reconsider our roots. [...]
By and large the educated elites in the Western world today are without religious belief and often animated by a “culture of repudiation,” keen to banish old ideas of the sacred from public life and to remake the institutions and structures of civil society so as to reflect their own liberated lifestyle. In America and [...]
Jimmy Carter was a nice, good man who epitomized American Christianity’s reduction to Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. As such, the singing of John Lennon's atheistic "Imagine"—Carter's favorite song—at the former president's funeral was entirely appropriate. Last week at former president Jimmy Carter’s funeral, country singers Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang ex-Beatle John Lennon’s song Imagine, [...]
God is always there, searching us out, and he is always saying, “Where are you?”, not because he does not know where we are, but because we do not know where we are, nor where we are going when sin and shame make us run from the only One who can heal us. Could have [...]
If Christmas is anything, it is a revolution of the heart against the tit-for-tat of this world, against the demands of this world for balancing the scales and righting every wrong with a hard justice. Ultimately, if this world is saved, it will be mercy, not justice, that saves it. I. When the Outlandish Is [...]
Contemplation is the prayer in which our love is directed toward God in Christ, where it is purified and refined until it sufficiently resembles His love for the union for which we yearn to take place. Without the infused virtues and the fruits and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that were given in contemplation, [...]
Human beings have an emotional and psychological need to convert history into a science, for we have longed to have life and the world make sense. Yet, there are no general laws of history that can give precise measurement to human thought or action. There is for historians only the intelligible disorder of life, the [...]
Like it or not, Grace exists despite Oren Cass’s inability to sense it. Now is the time to appeal to God to send His Grace to this age of little faith. Such a move is the only one that makes sense in the face of the postmodern decadence that now prevails. A disturbing new trend [...]
Augustine’s “Confessions” is first and foremost a prayer to God. Indeed, unless we read it as a prayer, we will not understand it; we will only study it. I Burned for Your Peace: Augustine’s Confessions Unpacked, by Peter Kreeft (240 pages, Ignatius Press, 2016) Back in 1990, I had the rare privilege of teaching in [...]