Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus

By |2024-03-17T08:59:03-05:00March 16th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Culture, History, Religion, Saint Patrick, Theology, Timeless Essays|

With my own hand I have written and put together these words to be given and handed on and sent to the soldiers of Coroticus. I cannot say that they are my fellow-citizens, nor fellow-citizens of the saints of Rome, but fellow-citizens of demons, because of their evil works. They are blood-stained: blood-stained with the [...]

The Incarnation of Truth and Love

By |2023-12-24T23:27:09-06:00December 24th, 2023|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christmas, Love, Paul Krause, Reason, Senior Contributors, Theology, Timeless Essays|

The real claim of Christmas, for Christians, is that Truth and Love penetrated the cosmos. Christmas is a warm, loving, and tender season precisely for this reason. That warm fire, or bright sky, or joyful company, is made possible only because that God which ever lives and loves—to which the whole creation moves—entered the creation [...]

Reaching Into the Silence

By |2023-12-02T20:47:55-06:00December 2nd, 2023|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Religion, Theology|

Ours is a restless, noisy, superficial world terrified by silence, enthralled with politics, disdainful of interiority. The modern secular person looks out, perhaps even with pride, at its bleak utilitarian contours, blinking, yet slouching towards metaphysics. But the Catholic humanist, remembering with a certain grateful awe Gerard Manley Hopkins’ insight that "the world is charged [...]

The Great Banquet

By |2023-11-05T08:33:38-06:00November 4th, 2023|Categories: Books, Christendom, Religion, Theology|

Is there some legitimate historical prophecy to which we may turn? Christendom replies to this question with a clear Yes. Christendom, after all, counts among its sacred scriptures the prophetic Book of the Apocalypse. Hope and History, by Josef Pieper (106 pages, Cluny Media) Is there some legitimate historical prophecy to which we may turn? [...]

Salvation and Sufficiency: A Lesson from Statistics

By |2023-09-27T17:51:42-05:00September 27th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Heaven, Religion, Romano Guardini, Science, Theology, Timeless Essays|

In the world of statistics, sufficiency plays an important role in estimation. But what about sufficiency in other aspects of our lives? What about God? What about my eternal destiny? What is sufficient, here and now, to know all that I can know about my purpose in this world and my fate when my time here [...]

The Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self

By |2023-11-25T12:28:01-06:00September 14th, 2023|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Dwight Longenecker, Philosophy, Rene Girard, Senior Contributors, Theology|

The prevalent tendency in our society to overestimate individual freedom is wreaking havoc on personal happiness and threatening to bring down Western culture. This culture is built on a Judeo-Christian foundation and it will not survive the dismantling of that foundation. Fr. Longenecker concludes his interview with author and friend of René Girard with a [...]

Theologian Gil Bailie’s Reflections on René Girard

By |2023-11-25T12:06:53-06:00August 29th, 2023|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, Philosophy, Rene Girard, Senior Contributors, Theology|

We are in a civilizational crisis, one that is the outworking of anthropological mistakes that have long festered. Increasingly in the history of Western culture we have forgotten or ignored or misconstrued, not only mimesis, but what is perhaps the most essential fact of human existence, namely, religious longing. Theologian Gil Bailie was a personal [...]

Shapers of Christian Orthodoxy

By |2023-07-16T21:41:36-05:00July 16th, 2023|Categories: Books, Bradley G. Green, Christianity, Senior Contributors, Theology|Tags: |

Christian theology should always be returning to Scripture, be immersing itself in Scripture, and seeking to understand God and His ways and His will through attention to God’s Word. Shapers of Christian Orthodoxy: Engaging with Early and Medieval Theologians, edited by Bradley G. Green (398 pages, IVP Academic, 2010) Whether you have studied academic theology or not, [...]

The Snow Rope

By |2023-06-05T16:38:16-05:00June 4th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Literature, Theology|

At his farm, my grandfather had rigged what he called his “snow ropes”: hand-hold-by-hand-hold, the snow ropes prevent getting lost and wandering off in who knows what direction only to freeze and be found come spring. I’m interested in “snow ropes” and, well, mysticism and religious language. The mystic says, that “God is a blinding [...]

Escaping the Cave of Liberalism

By |2023-08-19T08:50:35-05:00February 5th, 2023|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Humanum, Liberalism, New Polity, Philosophy, Theology|

D.C. Schindler's "The Politics of the Real" is a brilliant addition to the postliberal movement. By understanding liberalism as a distortion of the Christian order, we can recognize it as a sustained war upon reality. And we can understand a true postliberalism as nothing more or less than the New Evangelization, the effort of converting entire [...]

Joseph Butler & the Unity of Faith and Nature

By |2023-02-02T14:47:38-06:00February 2nd, 2023|Categories: Books, Christianity, Michael De Sapio, Philosophy, Senior Contributors, Theology|

Joseph Butler—Anglican bishop, theologian, and philosopher—strikes me as a man deeply involved with the great program of Christian humanism, one who did his bit to guide the ship of Western thought back to its moorings after skepticism had blown it off course. The Analogy of Religion, by Joseph Butler, edited by David McNaughton (259 pages, [...]

Aquinas & the Theology of Grace in Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgement”

By |2024-01-28T07:51:09-06:00January 27th, 2023|Categories: Art, Christianity, Culture, Heaven, St. Thomas Aquinas, Theology, Timeless Essays|

Portraying the souls of the faithful and those of the damned, “The Last Judgement” of Michelangelo serves as a powerful reminder of the theology of grace and of the importance of one’s own volition in accepting and actively cooperating with the grace which God so freely gives to men. The Last Judgement When [...]

The Political Philosophy of Joseph Ratzinger

By |2023-01-09T13:13:35-06:00January 9th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Modernity, Philosophy, Politics, Pope Benedict XVI, Theology|

Joseph Ratzinger was aware of the central event of modernity, namely the transferal of basic Christian categories from the transcendent order to the political order of this world. Like many classically trained German scholars, Joseph Ratzinger was learned in many spheres of knowledge. He displayed a considerable familiarity with those areas in which he did [...]

The Scandal of Christmas

By |2022-12-24T10:37:05-06:00December 24th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Christmas, Culture, Dwight Longenecker, Religion, Senior Contributors, Theology, Timeless Essays|

The Nativity is an outrage. God who is outside of time should not step into time. God the omnipotent should not become a helpless child. God the all-knowing should not empty himself and lock himself into the limitations of mortality. However, it is the incredible outrage of it all that gives one pause. After all, [...]

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