Humanity is mystified by Love. All humans experience it. None can explain it. The mysterious genesis of this strange gift, the wondrous beginnings of this bizarre quality within the human heart prompts the greatest quest of all: the quest for Love… My friend Carol is a writer of medical romantic fiction. This does not mean [...]
There are liars; there are damned liars; and there are those who preach evil in the name of love. Take, for instance, the mantra that love has no boundaries, which is one of the soundbites of the homosexist lobby. As with John Lennon’s mantra that all we need is love, it is difficult to argue [...]
“Since that night, I have a fire within me, which I cannot quench. I tried knowing God through reason. But now I must share the truth and the certainty that God has confirmed in my heart. I never thought a sense of peace and the passion of fire could reside in one’s heart simultaneously.” Editor’s [...]
In an age of cynicism and selfishness, Mike Rowe's "Returning the Favor" is an unabashedly feel-good show, telling the story of the many unsung, little, local platoons that comprise the heart of our communities and that quietly give the lie to the idea that only the omnipotent State can take care of us. Edmund Burke [...]
Much of suffering is an impenetrable mystery. But to a limited degree, we are able to understand suffering if we can come to understand what love is. Pope John Paul II, in Salvifici Doloris, writes, “Sacred Scripture is a great book about suffering.”[1] He then quotes the Old Testament to illustrate the spectrum of human suffering: the [...]
What was Ernest Hemingway illustrating about the emptiness of the generation in which he lived when he wrote A Farewell to Arms in 1929? If we unthinkingly pursue pleasure and live for nothing except ourselves, what are we left with? In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway portrays the character of Frederic Henry as a [...]
Although the potential range of emotional experience is essentially the same in all human beings, each culture exhibits its own patterns, inculcating certain feelings while discouraging others, promoting either expression or restraint, and defining variously the place of the emotions in everyday life. Americans believe that every person’s interior life is unique; consequently, an individual’s [...]
A genuinely ordered marriage is predicated on producing something more beautiful than the mere sum of its two parts, in the form of a third and synthesizing part: a child. Indeed, what they produce together is something new, something worthwhile, something beautiful. After all, two chords played separately are still not as beautiful as two [...]
We should consider G.K. Chesterton the great liberator and purifier of eros, fighting for its rights in the great civilizational turmoil of his times, and doing it in a strict accordance with the great philosophical and theological tradition of the West, not only Christian—but also Pagan… “There are more than enough considerations that might keep [...]
The church needs to ensure it is offering the true account of reality, rather than the account that the world is offering. That account, expressed through liturgy and worship, will form the Christian political imagination… Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology by James K.A. Smith (256 pages, Baker Academic, 2017) The present historical moment is a [...]
For Jane Austen, happiness in general is the goal of human action done according to morality, a code of conduct according to which every person has value; and happiness in marriage is the result of each spouse valuing and pursuing the other’s happiness above all else… In our time, according to one of several divergent [...]
Francesco Petrarch and Laura de Sade likely never met or spoke, but Petrarch wrote hundreds of sonnets about her and to her. When we think of love sonnets, most of us think of the sappy ooze of lyricists or the sometimes flavorless mush in cheap greeting cards. When they were first written in the fourteenth [...]
T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is far more than a tale for children. It is also one of the more humble and respectful modern literary interpretations of medieval culture, as well as a source of poignant reflections on subjects as diverse as political and social mores, love, and religious faith… One of the [...]
If there is a grand lesson to be found in Genesis, amidst its horrors and atrocities, it is that God continually calls His people back to Him… One would not be unjust in noting how unrelentingly violent and sexual the human person had become after the Fall in Eden. When God forces Adam and Eve [...]