My greatest concern as a teacher for more than thirty years was my students’ inability or unwillingness to read. I repeatedly tried, and repeatedly failed, to persuade them that when they read, they were not merely absorbing information, but were also, and more importantly, rehearsing acts of imagination. I. “Bisogna saper leggere,” Jakob Burckhardt told [...]
Many of Flannery O'Connor's stories portray the ineptness of men to uphold traditional ideals of manhood. The men show no leadership, they do not protect or care for their family members, they lack all manner of chivalry, and they lose a sense of priority as they commit to careers and professions or social and political [...]
All the King’s Men (1946): It’s as if Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) wrote this classic American tale principally for college and university students. With a solid foundation in the liberal arts, they will recognize the philosophical and psychological theories that a central character, Jack Burden, has in mind when he transforms them into excuses for [...]
Under what conditions is an aggressive war justified as punishment for a violation of the international order or as a redress for an injury suffered? Defensive war offers fewer problems. We have already pointed out that the justice of the cause of war must be certain for the public authority. Hence, the other party, in the dispute is [...]
"Stalag 17," set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II, is a genuine Christmas movie, albeit a complex one: at once a mystery, a comedy, a war story, and a morality play, all wrapped in barbed wire. Die Hard changed the definition of a “Christmas movie,” mostly providing dads an excuse [...]
In the present polarized climate, there is a constant battle between two ever-more irreconcilable sides. I think this is a good trend since the two parties do not live the fiction of getting along when the points of division are so great. I applaud any effort that results in moral clarity. It clears the air [...]
Was the immense popularity of the 1960s television series "Dark Shadows" some sort of cry for help during a decade of brutish violence and social sickness? After all, its central character Barnabas Collins was a vampire with moral compunction. I recently finished watching all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the campy gothic soap opera that [...]
Charlie Kirk's assassin symbolizes a subculture of rebellion found in recent shooters: full of dark, video-gaming, and Satanic themes. Indeed, like the biblical Cain, the assassin took his rage against the moral law to the point of killing one who embodied the ideal of that law. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is forcing the nation [...]
Prudence takes into account a deeper wisdom about the human condition than can be gleaned from a simple cost-benefit analysis. It understands that human communities are not merely about justice and the Gross Domestic Product, but about love. And sacrificial love doesn’t hesitate to rush in even against the worst odds. Recently I sat at [...]
Sexual difference is a symbol of one’s relation to the world, the whole of reality, to all others (and even to oneself), and ultimately to God. Initially, it may seem that the answer to the question that forms the title of this brief reflection would depend on the way one chose to define the first [...]
The Minneapolis killings prove that evil exists and hates good. The act was so heinous that Satan unmasks himself by showing his role in inspiring the shooter's hateful messages against the Catholic Church. Satan is real and working inside the postmodern world despite the liberal premise to the contrary. He showed his fiendish face at [...]
The moral choice in war is ascertained by doing a crude calculus: Of the available options, which kills the fewest? The option of Japan suddenly embracing peace is an illusion. The brutal calculation was: Do we kill so many people by dropping atomic bombs or so many more by invading? Those were the only two choices. [...]
More and more Americans, all of them convinced that their side is losing, try to rig the game in their favor. No longer willing to play fair, they want only to win. Born on October 4, 1809 and orphaned at the age of twelve, Robert Cumming Schenck overcame his early difficulties to earn a bachelor’s [...]
Contemplation is the prayer in which our love is directed toward God in Christ, where it is purified and refined until it sufficiently resembles His love for the union for which we yearn to take place. Without the infused virtues and the fruits and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that were given in contemplation, [...]