Religion is the traditional source of sexual ethics, the rules meant to govern our sexual conduct. Its declining influence over our culture has left sexual ethics without a foundation, and yet the need for it clearly remains. Many people feel that an ethics based solely on consent cannot satisfy all the needs generated by our [...]
“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.” The [...]
That God's love is ever present to us is of no doubt. The question is, what are we doing to receive it? It is only by daily turning away from self-absorption that we can become absorbed in the love of God that is continually poured out upon us by his son, Jesus Christ. When going [...]
At the very beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius writes that they have been written to enable a person “to conquer oneself.” The way this is done is by embracing the stoicism kept at bay in the early Church but introduced into Christianity at the Renaissance. When most of our school friends were dreaming [...]
In the midst of a dream, Orual’s doubts are finally answered by the gods. Once Psyche gives her the gift of beauty, and the God of the mountain appears and speaks to her, her ugliness is washed away. It takes all of Orual’s life to come to this point of faith and cleansing, and now [...]
Today in America, people of faith are binding up the unraveled fabric of civil society in tangible ways. We hold the threads individually, but when they are bound together, we can reweave a picture of order and beauty in human souls, woven in the vibrant colors of love. People of faith have given our culture [...]
The planting of trees in the orchard—the passing down of tradition, of the moral wisdom of the past, of the torch of life, and of the beauty of life’s simplest but richest and pleasures—produces the great harvest of joy that culminates in the final chapters of the "Odyssey." Editor’s Note: This is the final essay [...]
The poetry of John Keats is a window into the mad genius of the Romantics: their lusts and hopes; their ambitions and ignorance; their radicalism and fantasies. In reading Keats, one is simultaneously scandalized and sympathetic to the longing of the Romantic heart. “The best things we have come from madness.” John Keats died only [...]
If you continue persevering in prayer, come what may, the subtle magnetic force of God’s love becomes stronger. Then, as this process continues and you feel you are going nowhere, a welcome change takes place. When your purification has been sufficiently advanced you are able to experience the love of the Holy Spirit enveloping you [...]
A beauty-first approach recovers a sense of life as a great adventure. To be human is to be disposed to fall in love with reality, to be struck by the beauty of the things of this world and thus, through the wound it opens in our heart, to be drawn into reality, to want to penetrate [...]
When we are made like Him through His grace, His sacraments, through prayer where we commune with Our Saviour, then, the call to be perfect as our heavenly Father is not so much an impossible and absurd imposition but an urging to follow the path with Christ, even to Calvary, even to the Cross, so [...]
Do you go to prayer for what you get out of God or for what you want to give him, with and through Christ who died for us on the Cross? There is an unwritten law in every religious order or congregation that no one should interfere with the person in charge of the novices. [...]
True tradition is allowing true love to be handed on. That is what the word tradition means. It is continually handed on to be received by each successive generation by the Risen Christ through His sacraments. In an earlier chapter I told the story of how a scripture scholar who wrote a book in the [...]
There is only one power that can destroy this evil at its source within us, and that is the power of infinite love. When we do all in our power to invite infinite love into our hearts, we are doing the most important thing we can so that evil may be defeated and good may [...]