Restorationist church movements—whether they be traditionalist Catholic or Protestant sects—are products of their contemporary culture: well-meaning but artificial attempts at restoration, which end up being no more than the past viewed through a half-baked ecclesiology and a rose-tinted theology. As a boy, I attended a church that was founded in 1962. It grew out of [...]
During this season of Lent it is helpful to reflect on how mimetic desire—defined as “imitation envy"—connects with and influences the classic seven deadly sins. The French thinker Rene Girard had a seminal insight which has shed light on just about every aspect of human endeavor from theology and anthropology to economics, politics, psychology, and [...]
David Angten’s "The Medievalist" takes us into the grubby underbelly of Tinseltown, but there is a morality woven through the story that is convincing. A gripping, thought-provoking, entertaining, and fun novel, I hope it will not be classified as “Catholic fiction.” It's too good for that. Having somewhat of a public platform in these pages [...]
In “Ash Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot repudiated his ironic style along with his despairing and nihilistic view of the world. When he wrote it, he was turning from the hell of the wasteland of unbelief to receive his ashes and begin his long Lent. T.S. Eliot’s secret baptism in 1927 marked one of the most remarkable [...]
One comes away from both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby" and Evelyn Waugh’s "Brideshead Revisited" with an acute sense of the emptiness of the jazz age and the despair at the heart of all our delusions and decadence. One also can’t help but compare the lives of the authors themselves. On re-reading The Great Gatsby (thanks [...]
As one of the greatest bridges from the ancient world to the medieval, St. Augustine of Hippo’s "Confessions" illuminates the path forward through the gloom of the modern world. And C.C. Pecknold's new book, "Fire on the Altar" is a wonderful guide to this masterpiece. Fire on the Altar: Setting Our Souls Ablaze through St. [...]
Philip Lawler rightly observes that the core problem in the Catholic Church, and at the heart of American Christianity in general, is a loss of faith. In his novel "Ghost Runner," he takes us into the corridors of power both in diocese and D.C., reminding us how venality, vanity, corruption, immorality, and lack of faith [...]
Bethlehem today is a bustling, modern city on the side of a hill, but at the time of Jesus’ birth it would have been a settlement of simple cave houses. In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton famously salvaged the caveman of popular imagination—suggesting that the neanderthal was a brilliant artist, not a brute. He then [...]
Like all genuine eccentrics, John Cyril Hawes was a blend of genius and madness. His fantastical, eclectic architecture captures the contradictions of the man: traditional, but modern; romantic but gritty and down-to-earth; artistic but tough; cantankerous but compassionate to the poor. He was a solitary hermit who became famous. Author Peter Anson—himself a convert to [...]
Netflix’s Death by Lightning dramatizes the brief but important presidency of James Garfield. Outlined in Candace Millard’s 2011 book, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, this fine, but flawed production charts Garfield’s unexpected rise to the White House and the tragedy of his assassination by the [...]
In Welsh, “Capel-y-Ffin” means “chapel at the boundaries.” It is an apt name, not only because of its location in the border land between Wales and England, but also because it is a place where the boundaries between religion and reality, monasticism and morality, chastity and carnality, and (it must be said) sanity and insanity [...]
What is this fear of spiders? There is a natural fear of venomous creatures, but the spider’s venom is not the only threat. She spins a web. She entraps her prey. She wraps them tightly to eat them later. As the ghost in Hamlet cries about his own venomous murder: “O Horrible, O horrible, most [...]
Fr. Philip Caraman not only epitomized the best of the Jesuit tradition in England, but he also chronicled the legacy of his heroic forebears: the Jesuit missionaries and martyrs of Tudor England as well as the courageous counter-Reformation apostles to the Americas, India, China, and beyond. Philip Caraman Rex Mottram—the Canadian dolt who [...]
A Victorian cleric named Joseph Leycester Lyne dreamed of establishing an Anglican monastery at Llanthony, Wales. Lyne took the name of Father Ignatius and has gone down in history as one of the most eccentric and and energetic of all Anglo-Catholic pretenders. Ignatius of Llanthony During the first years of my quarter of [...]