For the past quarter of a century I’ve been honoured to edit the St. Austin Review, popularly known as the StAR, a Catholic cultural journal, published six times a year. The StAR was launched in September 2001, the month of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. It appeared in the midst of that darkest of months as [...]
A look at four more unsung heroes from the Australian continent, including the great Frank Sheed! In the previous essay in this series, we focused on two heroic Australian Catholics who witnessed to the Faith in their defense of the dignity of the human person. In this chapter, we will celebrate four other Australians whose heroism [...]
Between the potency and the existence… falls the Shadow. These words of T. S. Eliot always come to mind whenever I find myself reading works in translation. The sad fact is that the pure potency of the original work in its original language is lost in its translation to another tongue. And yet, for those [...]
The culture of death that the government of the UK has unleashed on its own people is all so diabolically ugly that it has something of the character of the caricature. It has the grimness of the grimace of a grotesque gargoyle. There was something darkly comical about the recent revelation that the grandfather of [...]
***** Please join us by making your donation today in celebration of our 15th anniversary. Every contribution—whether $1500, $150, or $15—joins with our labor and prayer to restore the best of Christendom. —W. Winston Elliott, Publisher ***** An Electronic Inklings by Bradley Birzer I remember it well. Fifteen years ago, on a hot, humid summer afternoon [...]
John Plunkett defended the dignity of the natives of Australia; Caroline Chisholm defended the dignity of vulnerable immigrants to Australia. In doing so, they offer a living witness to the Lord’s commandment that we love our neighbors. Long after European adventurers had first sailed into the mystic West to discover the New World of the Americas, [...]
I have sought since my conversion to use the gifts that God has given me to glorify Him and to bring souls to Him, in contrast to the way that I had previously used those same gifts to glorify hatred and to lead souls astray. I’m in receipt of correspondence from a young woman, received [...]
Why, one wonders, was Hilaire Belloc so wrong about World War One when he was so right about so many other things? The trouble with satire is that it is topical. It is a child of its time. It is similar to a fad or a fashion. It is very up to date. And the [...]
Amidst the battered "Veritas" of Harvard, there are a few still heroically walking in the footsteps of their Catholic predecessors. It is ironic and risible in the extreme that the motto of Harvard University is “Veritas” because that once-illustrious institution has long since abandoned any belief in objective verity. It has ceased to seek answers [...]
Hilaire Belloc’s final words of wisdom might enable us to become truly oriented, taking the right path at the right pace to the right place. How do we get to heaven? The answer, it seems, is on foot. Hilaire Belloc was a man of many talents and a man of many parts. He wrote poetry [...]
"Into the tempests of the nineteenth century, Juan Donoso Cortes rode as knight-errant, prophet, and Man of the West.” Such is the picture that historian Christopher Olaf Blum paints of one of the most important thinkers of the past two hundred years. Yet the romantic image of Donoso Cortes as a latter-day Don Quixote will [...]
What makes a good priest and what are we to make of a bad priest? These questions are at the heart of two classic twentieth century novels, published just four years apart. The first, Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, published in 1936, recounts the struggles of a young priest, newly appointed to [...]
Each of us needs to be living courageously in goodness, truth and beauty, remembering at all times that sanity and sanctity are ultimately synonymous. With respect to literature, we need to preserve and promote the legacy of Christendom, of Christian Civilization, by promoting the reading and teaching of the Great Books. Robert Lazu Kmita interviews [...]
If pride might be said to be the making of God in our own image, a lesser form of pride is the making of our gods, our idols, into our own image. This latter form of pride, what might be called pride in the lower key, is made manifest in the multifarious ways in which [...]