Suddenly, a demographic winter is upon us. We’ve seen it coming for decades. However, the effects of this population implosion are now starting to be felt. Nation after nation report low birth rates and aging populations. No amount of monetary incentive is enough to change people’s minds—even in more traditional societies. Women and couples seem [...]
The challenge we face today is humanizing a Bureaucratic Regime, just as our ancestors humanized a German warrior regime. We’re in the position of the Apostle Paul, handcuffed to a Praetorian guard. As the Bubble grows more psychotic and inhumane, opportunities for evangelistic kindness and witness multiply exponentially. As we survey our emerging Bureaucratic Regime [...]
I find in the Universe so many forms of order, organization, system, law and adjustment of means to ends, that I believe in a cosmic intelligence and I conceive God as the life, mind, order and law of the world. I do not understand my God, and I find in nature and history many instances [...]
A certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seem so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause [...]
We have handicapped children by letting our concern for their safety overrule the enormous benefits that come with the way they naturally play. Last semester, some of our faculty recently participated in on-site CPR training on a Saturday morning. And again, this semester, on a Friday evening. Aside from the comfort you should derive knowing [...]
St. Benedict’s civilized communities remind us that personal virtue is vital for a civilisation of decency, order, and peaceful prosperity. A Christian needs to listen to God, listen to the Scriptures, listen to the Church and listen to the Holy Spirit within us. Then comes action. In the summer of 1987 I had three months [...]
The recovery of fatherhood is not merely a political and sociological challenge, to be met by strengthening the legislation that keeps families together, deters separation, and insists that a man takes more responsibility for his children. What needs to be recovered is a vision, a sense of responsibility, a “creative vow.” The collapse of marriage in [...]
Each year the third Sunday in June is designated as Father’s Day, a day on which we honor our Nation’s fathers for everything they do for their families and for America. Today fatherhood is sometimes drily described as a craft or an occupation, something which competes with career or outside pursuits for time and attention. [...]
All the immortal myths, sagas, and fairytales we locate in the world of make-believe are retold in the Bible. Likewise with our school's recent production of "The Sound of Music," whose Cinderella story of the pure maid who hears a call from God echoes unconsciously into their lives in a classical Catholic academy. The [...]
Because life often comes at you very fast, the cleaning of a khaki couch, like the cleansing of Augean stables, is a task that often waits for a hero’s journey. Or at least a lot of free time. This trembling period of early Covid insanity was one such time in which I felt both impulses. [...]
What we need in American society are more imaginative resources for thinking about marriage and the great slog of parenthood. We need stories, plays, movies, and shows about the sort of heroism that requires long-haul fortitude and not just courage in the moment. A long-held but somewhat flexible fantasy I have engaged in periodically since [...]
To the philosopher, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. — Emerson What is wisdom? I feel like a droplet of spray which proudly poised for a moment on the crest of a wave, undertakes to analyze the sea. Ideally, wisdom is total [...]
Wilhelm Röpke grew mesmerized by population growth projections which counted 300 billion inhabitants on the Earth by the year 2300. In such an anthill existence, he asked, what would happen to those “unbought graces of life”: “nature, privacy, beauty, dignity, birds and woods and fields and flowers, repose and true leisure.” Wilhelm Röpke was an [...]
Eating together, as a social event, is meant to be time-consuming because it is meant to be an intimate experience where friendship—true friendship—is experienced, rekindled, and love stands at the center of the dinner table. It is, in its own way, a call to sacrifice. Aristotle identified man’s eating habits as one of the cornerstones of civilization—one [...]