Irrespective of what we might feel about the evil of war, or the evil we see in our neighbours, is it right to treat the plight of our fellow men with indifference, as the American poet, Sara Teasdale, does in "There Will Come Soft Rains”? And in her poem, is Teasdale exhibiting the same failure [...]
The peace of God to be found in Paradise passes all our human understanding in this vale and veil of tears and in this cloud of unknowing that we call mortal life, but it doesn’t pass the perfected beatified human understanding of those who gain the beatific vision. Over the Christmas period I had time [...]
Dear Santa, Last week, I sent you a list of recently published books which I hoped you would consider placing under the tree of those good boys and girls who enjoy reading the same sort of books that I do. Those books were mostly about the great writers, thinkers and musicians who have graced the [...]
It is understandable that those forced into the ghetto or shepherded onto the reservation should feel anger. It is reasonable to expect that those who are forcibly marginalized will be resentful of those who have used force against them. But this is the way of the world. It is not the way of Christ, nor [...]
Dear Santa, This year I’m not going to ask for any new books for myself because I’ve been blessed to receive so many new books throughout the year that the bookshelves and bookcases around our home are filled to the point of bursting. My bibliophilic cup runneth over! Instead, I’d like to send you a [...]
History is full of surprises. One such surprise is the manner in which the secularist cataclysm of the French Revolution prompted a religious revival across the Channel in England. It was indeed ironic that the new spirit of absolute religious intolerance in France following that country’s Revolution of 1789 prompted a new spirit of relative [...]
A few weeks ago, I imagined which ten volumes I would select for my personal library were I to find myself locked up in a prison cell or perhaps washed up on a desert island. More recently, I offered a handful of poems for Halloween. Now, I have selected six paintings for the walls of [...]
Georg Ratzinger in his childhood and youth had seen and experienced the consequences of secular fundamentalism at first hand. He was all too aware that there is precious little difference between the various shades of socialism. Big Brother, by any other name, is an enemy of freedom. On August 21, 2008, Pope Benedict described his [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien was right: Fairy-stories do hold up a mirror to man. They show us ourselves: who we are, who we might become, and who we are called to be. To gaze into such a mirror is perilous; to fail to do so, is more perilous still. In his famous lecture and essay “On Fairy-Stories”, [...]
In the end, we can know who we are in light of what we are called to be, or we can know nothing because we believe that life is nothing and that it signifies nothing. It is the choice between life and death, and between the culture of life and the culture of death. Where [...]
Having imagined myself spending countless hours reading these ten specially selected tomes, it dawns on me that there are worse ways of spending one’s time than in solitary confinement, even with such a limited library. Last week I recorded a podcast for the “Inner Sanctum” of my personal website discussing “Ten Essential Books for My [...]
As I experienced the charm and enchantment of this local Shakespeare festival, it was easy to become forgetful in the best sense of the word, imagining a world of localism, free of globalist domination and unseen by the Eye of Sauron. A couple of years ago, I was driven by an atheist friend to the [...]
How could one possibly identify with the utterly pathetic and self-centred Gollum? The only answer, I came to understand with a sickening sense of resignation, is that those who identify with Gollum are those whose own identity has been gollumized by their slavery to the power of the real-life Ring which rules their lives. One [...]
If we have the humility of the saint and the eyes of the Romantic poet, we will be grateful for the gift of beauty, being rendered speechless in its presence that we might hearken to the silence and its visual music. It is through this silence, born of wonder, that we are moved to the [...]