All natural loves, even love of the land, must suffer death and burial in the raw world and the winter of this life. But Hilaire Belloc, who “received the sacrament of that wide and silent beauty” of his native Sussex at night, was confident that he would see it and his departed friends face to [...]
To curse God is not to resolve the suffering, but to give in to it, to make despair the beginning and ending of the universe. But God is bigger than the universe and all the suffering that occurs within it. In the end, all will be set to rights when the one who condemns becomes [...]
The culture of death that the government of the UK has unleashed on its own people is all so diabolically ugly that it has something of the character of the caricature. It has the grimness of the grimace of a grotesque gargoyle. There was something darkly comical about the recent revelation that the grandfather of [...]
With a lantern that wouldn't burn In too frail a buggy we drove Behind too heavy a horse Through a pitch-dark limitless grove. And a man came out of the trees And took our horse by the head And reaching back to his ribs Deliberately stabbed him dead. The ponderous beast went down With a [...]
Recently, my cousin Keena’s husband of nearly thirty years died after a two-year fight with colon cancer. I was glad to attend the funeral and spend time with her and the family afterward. Mourning with those who mourn is a command we ought to take seriously, for it carries its own blessings, even if we [...]
The positive secular reviews that have come in for my off-Broadway verse drama, "Death Comes for the War Poets," show the power of art to touch hearts even in enemy territory, in the secular art community of New York City, that most “woke” of communities in that most “woke” of cities. This shows the evangelizing [...]
The Church, through the wonderful devotion of the Office of the Dead, allows us to both grieve and hope for the ones we’ve lost. St. Braulio, addressing death itself, says: “But your power is broken. Your heinous yoke has been destroyed by the One who sternly threatened you when Hosea cried out, 'O Death! I [...]
We now live in a world, as I suppose we always have, that needs to relearn what happened in Oklahoma City 29 years ago. We need to know and feel what radical violence looks like, what it means to snuff out human life for no reason... how it crushes the survivors, and disfigures the communities [...]
Both John Paul II and T.S. Eliot give people something to hope for: St. John Paul speaks of a new springtime on the horizon signaling the emergence of a culture of life, and Eliot ends “The Waste Land” on a hopeful, if cryptic, note. We are all familiar with Saint John Paul II’s description of [...]
State-sponsored murder was the primary fact of the twentieth century—not the rise of democracy or the liberation of peoples, as many have been taught, but the devastating horrors of the gulag, the holocaust, and the killing fields. It was in June 1996 that I picked up a book that, for all intents and purposes, changed my [...]
There is no want of faith in fear of death—in fact, it is right to fear it and shrink from it, since death has come into the world through sin. But the fear can gradually be tempered by hope, and reduced as we grow in Christhood and in love for God, because Christ, by surrendering [...]
Like the Greek tragic heroes of Oedipus and Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer used his almost superhuman intellect and ability to achieve something that led not only to his own suffering, but also to the suffering of others. Americans today would do well to heed the lessons passed down from the Greek tragedians about the reckless [...]
Even in God's majesty as bridegroom on the other side of death, beyond the light of the stars, the deep humility also present in Charity presents itself. If we cannot recognize the Good, we cannot recognize Love when we meet Him beyond the liminal, the threshold of death into eternity. Death is a part of [...]
My friend John O'Connell was a conservative of the truest stamp, never miseducated, never subject to the whims and fashions of opinion. A man of dignified piety, his principles were strong and unshakable. I have had occasion many times to say that Jack was the best man I knew, and I do not want his [...]