I encourage those who smoke to light a cigar in solitude or with a band of brothers. Recite a poem out loud or in the confines of your soul. Rejoice, reflect, and ponder over the mystery of our faith in Jesus Christ. What is a cigar to a man if not a sacred companion? Never [...]
The Articles of Confederation were doomed by their perceived structural weakness. Yet defenders of the Articles at the time correctly pointed out that this early constitution, drafted under intense pressure at a critical time in the country’s history and intended to deal foremost with the exigencies of war, had been remarkably successful. The Declaration of [...]
Saint Augustine was the first Christian to offer a comprehensive Philosophy of History, which the Russian Orthodox writer Nicholas Berdyaev called nothing short of “ingenious.”[1] One of his greatest accomplishments was the sanctification of Plato’s understanding of the two realms: the perfect Celestial Kingdom and the corrupt copy. One finds this tension and conflict between [...]
For most of our veterans, it should go without saying that military discipline and experience give them a moral authority. It is a recognition—once universal—that is too often forgotten in an age when patriotism itself seems suspect to many. On this day when we honor our veterans, it’s good to recollect both the debt of [...]
As we approach Remembrance Sunday I am reposting this sonnet about the two minutes silence, which was first published in my book Sounding the Seasons. I'm posting it early so that any one who wishes to, can use it in services or events on this Remembrance Sunday. So here is how it came to be [...]
The poet’s career doesn’t end once he dies. The soldier’s career arguably does. The poet-soldier, then, has died physically, but what remains of him is his art. Both Edward Thomas and Francis Ledwidge managed to create something that transcended their persons and lasted long after being killed in war. When we think of English poetry, [...]
The year 1989 may well be seen by future historians as one of those rare pivotal years of this past millennium—like 1066, 1492, 1793, and 1914—that profoundly altered the direction of Western Civilization. It is, of course, still too early to say for certain that we as a society set ourselves on a dangerous collision [...]
The horror genre is not about gore. Rather, it is about the human soul: its capacity for depraved conduct, but also its capacity to recognize the natural order of our existence and to work to re-establish that order at great sacrifice and in the face of evils born of hubris, self-divinization, and even tragic error. [...]
We of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. But how, without history, can we understand these events? “History” said Henry Ford, “is bunk.” As one who has written history for twenty-five years, and studied [...]
At this season of the year, on the 1st and 2nd of November, the Church ‘keeps the feast’ two days running, with a pair of feasts; All Saints and All Souls, each of which begins with that wonderfully Biblical and inclusive little word All. I remember the effect that little word had on me, coming [...]
True saints never put their faith in the surety of other saints in an ultimate sense. They put it in the Lord Jesus himself. And that is an infallible truth that is truly ecumenical. One of the big worries of liberal and progressive Catholic theologians during the thirty-five years of the terms of office of [...]
Great music pierces the soul… and can sometimes terrify it. Over the centuries, composers, like nearly all artists of every variety, have been fascinated by the subject of death and by the supernatural—the world of witches, goblins, ghosts, and demons. Composers have given us Dances of the Dead, frightful tone poems and songs, scary opera [...]
However we choose to look at it, October thrills and titillates each of our senses and reaches into the very depths of our suspect souls, whether we actually encounter the dead or merely imagine their various states of being. Oh, the blessings of October, my favorite month. As far back as I can remember, in [...]
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore — While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “ ’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door — Only [...]