We all know the dangers of too much noise, the dissipating distraction of too much chatter. Yet not all silence is good. There is a painful silence when a conversation has died because no one knows what to say. Even worse is the silence that follows a quarrel. But of course, silence can also be [...]
One longstanding Church practice oriented to the worship of God has been the chanting of psalms and hymns. From the earliest times, monks engaged in liturgical chanting that complemented their often grueling lives. These monks managed to accommodate hours spent in choir while providing for their material needs. In his French-language book, Pourquoi Mozart, author [...]
“Your faith has saved you.” Jesus repeatedly shares these comforting words throughout the Gospels. Among many examples, Jesus says this to the sinful woman at the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:50), to the hemorrhaging woman who touched the fringe of his garment (Matt 9:22), and to a blind beggar near Jericho (Luke 18:42). [...]
Creation is the accuser of the ungodly. For through its inherent spiritual principles, creation proclaims its Maker; and through the natural laws intrinsic to each individual species it instructs us in virtue. The spiritual principles may be recognized in the unremitting continuance of each individual species, the laws in the consistency of its natural activity. [...]
Although there may be a hundred and one things that can be done in a Jubilee Year, there is one thing above all others, without which everything else is pointless. First and foremost, it is a time to turn back and embrace anew the only form of love that can unite us with God. In [...]
The contrast between heaven and earth is one of the most pervasive concepts in religious language, a commonplace so common that we rarely stop to think about its meaning. What does it mean, in mythopoetic terms and in literal terms? To put it plainly, what is heaven and what is earth? I was blessed to [...]
For Jane Austen’s heroines, marriage is the end towards which their virtuous lives are directed. Above all other blessings Oh! God, for ourselves, and our fellow-creatures, we implore Thee to quicken our sense of thy Mercy in the redemption of the World, of the Value of that Holy Religion in which we have been brought [...]
Russell Kirk’s horror stories are fundamentally conservative, insinuating a chain of being that connects the living and the dead, reminding us of our duty and obligations to the past. They challenge us by piercing our day-to-day sense of the temporal with bright flashes of eternal order. And they lay upon us the heavy but joyous [...]
In Mary’s body, we see the total gift of God’s grace in raising and glorifying our lowly bodies to that “lofty goal” unattainable by our own efforts. All the evil which eats up our bodies—our diseases, discomforts, lusts, and addictions—will be trampled upon not by abandoning the body, but by glorifying it. As a child, [...]
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 [...]
Thankfulness to God who offers friendship is the sine qua non of eucharistic living. Thankfulness for and attention to our old friends make us open to new friends whom God will place in our lives. In that way, our friendships here prepare us for heaven. Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human (173 [...]
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 world is always at war with Christ and His Church, and the worldly within the Church are always in an unholy alliance with the world. The world is a vale of tears and a land of exile. There was no golden age and there will be no golden age of Christendom. How, then, might [...]
Which way is heaven? For those of us who are keen to get there, this is an important question; indeed, a crucial one. Do we look up at the twinkling stars, wondering what they are in childlike contemplation? Is this assent to the innocence of wonder the ascent to heaven, or the necessary prerequisite for [...]