For many years I’ve been teaching online courses for Red Cultural in Chile. During last week’s session of a course on “Literary Converts”, based on my book of that title, I was asked whether there are still good works of literature being written today. I replied effusively in the affirmative. I was then asked whether [...]
E.F. Schumacher succeeded in popularizing Catholic social teaching in a way that far exceeded the limited success of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton to do the same thing fifty years earlier. It is not often that the publication of a single book can change the perception of millions of people around the world. Small Is Beautiful by [...]
The final word on the legacy of John Fisher and Thomas More, and the final judgment (under God) on why we should see them as heroes, is given by G. K. Chesterton, a man who proves in his very self that the killing of More and Fisher did not kill learning, laughter or holiness: "There [...]
Do we not find ourselves living with a scenario in which the liberal elites consider themselves to be the wise, cool minds overseeing and running things. Do they not look upon those who oppose their agenda as being a “savage,” “uncivilized” set of local people, natives, “deplorables”, who must be subordinated to the elite’s will [...]
Ngo Dinh Diem, the first President of South Vietnam, and JFK were both Catholics, though Catholics of very different persuasions. Landscape The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was one of the landmark moments and one of the most remembered events in twentieth-century history. The assassination of President Diem of Vietnam [...]
Christian realist fiction refrains from the depiction of anything fantastic, magical, miraculous, or overtly supernatural, instead showing the struggle between good and evil which rages in each individual human heart. Here are four such novels that may not be classics, but which are worth reading and perhaps revisiting. In an effort to serve as a [...]
Mother Mary Lange lived to be more than ninety years old, dying in 1882. Much changed in Baltimore and in the United States during her long and self-sacrificial life. But one thing that never changed was her loyalty to the Catholic Faith and her tireless life of service to Christ and the Church He founded. [...]
Why not imagine what Chesterton would choose for summer reading were he to return for a brief visit from the undying lands, where we can imagine he now makes his permanent residence? This is the time of year when people are asked to compile their summer reading lists. The idea of these lists, as far [...]
In seeing his broken and mortal body in the light of the permanence of his immortal soul, novelist Maurice Baring learned to accept his affliction. Such acceptance is not only the secret of life, as his priest character had proclaimed, it is also the secret of love. There is a painting in London’s National Portrait [...]
Something is stirring underground. Something exciting. Something new. Something invigorating. Refreshing. Needed. The something to which I refer is a new Catholic cultural revival, which is being made manifest in the visual arts, music and most especially in literature. Last week, in the first of these “notes from underground”, I focused on murder mysteries being [...]
Perhaps the final fall that proceeds from a life of prideful “success,” irrespective of the judgment of God which follows, is the miserable way in which tyrants die. I was intrigued by some of the comments prompted by my essay “Does History Repeat Itself?” In particular, my eyebrows were raised by the objections to my [...]
These six composers might not have been saints, but the splendor of their voices bears a living witness to the Lord. Well may we hope and pray that their songs may continue to be sung and that they may be heard more clearly amid the din and discord of our modern world. Christianity has died [...]
Today, in the real-life web of deceit, depravity, and diabolical darkness in which we find ourselves, good and healthy murder mysteries can inoculate the soul of the reader from the toxic mainstream. They help to expose the crimes of the culture of death, serving as undercover agents in the countercultural underground. The culture of death [...]
Where there is Pride, there is prejudice; where there is prejudice, there is hatred; where there is hatred, there is the dehumanizing of the enemy; and where there is the dehumanizing of the enemy, there is the extermination that follows. As I watch the rise of the politics of hatred sweep like an angry wave [...]