You hear over and over again how people wish they had just seen the person they love one more time, or done this or that for her before she died. But I had that for nearly a decade. I knew Sharon was dying, and I tried to make the most of it. On September 18, [...]
What I find so hard and why Houston is so much like Heaven is that I know there will be many great things in my new place. Things I will not be able to imagine. New friends unasked for and unlooked for whom God will put in my path. New opportunities that I would never [...]
A culture that fails to represent, or that misrepresents its wars in all their glory, gravity, and tragedy, is a weaker polity. Epic poetry, with its stark recording of the facts and feelings of war, can give cultures and communities access to the reality of warfare and inscribe its memory on the collective consciousness and [...]
A few weeks ago, as I was looking up my undergraduate advisor’s address, I was stunned to find that he’d passed away in September. Professor Walter T.K. Nugent was 86. He was a great teacher, a great scholar, and a great man. He equally inspired and intimidated me, and I’m deeply proud to count him [...]
Ambassador Young Ambassador Johnny Young. Johnny. Just plain, old Johnny, as Johnny once referred to himself. And that description may be the most remarkable thing about Johnny. He was just plain, old Johnny even when he was a four-time ambassador. His Christian humility seemed to gain luster with each promotion and award. I cannot [...]
Is Technocracy our God in the modern world? Today, the unthinkable becomes doable, and the doable is unquestioned. Apart from the decision to manufacture the atomic bombs, what about the decision to actually use them on Japan? The struggle to understand why anyone would want to use power to create nothing began for me with [...]
Prompted to compose his marvelous tour de force, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” after reading the report of a shipwreck off the coast of England, the priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins gives one of the most profound and penetrating meditations on the mystery of suffering. The mystery of suffering, or the problem of pain as C.S. Lewis [...]
Responding to the great bloodshed of young men, women, and virgins he experienced during the Peloponnesian War, Euripides exposes the horrors of war and its damaging effects on humans, particularly on women, in his war plays. Euripides’s dramatic tragedies appeal to our sense of pity and call for peace. The acme of Euripides’s literary genius [...]
The end of the world is nigh. It is this ultimate reality which should animate and motivate us. The devil might be able to hang us before he hangs himself, but he can’t deprive us of the resurrection which will separate us from his clutches forever. Give the devil enough rope and he’ll hang himself. [...]
In the year 793, Catholic monks made the following report, all of it disturbing: In this dire year portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consisted of immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine immediately followed those signs, and a little [...]
Suppose an anthropologist were asked, apart from the sound and fury of current politics, what were the signs of a dying culture, or a culture committing suicide? What might he respond, as following from human nature and from the terms of the question itself? What might he notice in our own? Such a culture would [...]
A call to the Trappists to order a child’s casket is one no parent wants to make, but the monks provide comfort and support for the grieving families by always sending the casket as a gift. The monks themselves have been surprised by how much fruit has been borne by their prayer and work. Trappists, [...]
I have no memory of my father, and I don’t have the same precious treasures as my two older brothers do to pull out in times of great sorrow or great joy. I’m sure my lack of having a father has affected me in ways I’ll never understand. Such is God’s providence in this Valley [...]
Dealing with the topic of death, Dietrich von Hildebrand’s consoling book “Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven” shines both in its “dark” and “light” halves, illuminating the eternal duality of human life and helping to reconcile its painful contradictions. Life is not a journey of diminishing returns, ending in darkness and the grave, but a [...]