Chaucer’s satire on innovative theories of marriage and the heresy of courtly love validates the wisdom of the Church’s teaching on hierarchy, fidelity, and indissolubility. The great books or classics of Western civilization reflect the enduring ideals and universal truths that represent a Perennial Philosophy, that is, the sum of the world’s accumulated wisdom over [...]
T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” shows that men do not need more pleasurable escapes or more time, but loving friends and an introduction to reality. They need to listen to human voices instead of the illusive mermaids out in the ocean. And they need to do this before the shock [...]
The purpose of growing old is to grow up. The purpose of life is to grow in wisdom and virtue (the two are synonymous, though the latter word is banned from all polite discourse in our rancid and rotten culture). If one grows old without growing in wisdom, one is a miserable loser. For most [...]
Seeing something noble in Romeo and Juliet’s self-obsessive and self-destructive passion is to see it with eyes that are blind to the moral that Shakespeare teaches. Romeo and Juliet is not the only Shakespeare play that the modern world, modern critics, and modern teachers get wrong. Truth be told, Shakespeare abuse is rampant. Just about every [...]
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 [...]