Like another John the Baptist, the preacher makes straight the way of the Lord. Using human means and human words, God is pleased to bring about the salvation of his people. St. John Paul II was a preacher. This is part of a series entitled, “Preaching: Feeding Fellow Beggars.” Read the series introduction here. To see [...]
The seven pillars of Western Civilization are the edifying edifices which tower over the landscape of the centuries as a fortress of faith and a beacon of reason. Islam has served throughout the centuries as an outside force which has repeatedly laid siege to the fortress, seeking its overthrow. I once wrote an essay for [...]
Russell Amos Augustine Kirk is one of America’s foremost and most important thinkers, especially in the desiccated and mutilated 20th century, an era of horrific inhumanities and incessant blood-letting. Kirk stood for a more humane age that valued the dignity and uniqueness of each human person and that unabashedly sought the good, the true, and [...]
Making the spiritual ascent into God is rather like trying to run up a downward escalator. The moment you stop moving steadily forwards is the moment when you start moving steadily downward. Going forwards means finding daily time to do what St Peter told his listeners to do when he was the first to announce [...]
Apart from his literary influence, John Henry Newman’s stature as a theologian is inestimable and his contribution to the fields of philosophy and history are not inconsiderable. And, above all, he was a man whose holiness has touched millions. It is for this reason that he was canonized and it is for this reason, beyond [...]
The once-radical belief that Christopher Columbus was evil has sadly become mainstream. But Columbus was a brave and tenacious explorer—flawed, of course, like every man—who expanded the knowledge of the Old World, changing it and the New World forever. Christopher Columbus changed the world. It’s as simple as this. We might argue that these changes [...]
Christopher Columbus offers us the example of those virtues that the old Romans called fortitude and constancy; and the example of those virtues that the early Christians called faith and hope. Half a millennium ago, a Genoese navigator with three caravels and Spanish crews groped his way among the islands of the Caribbean. Thus commenced [...]
The West is dying because it has turned its back on the Permanent Things. But what will be left when the secularist “West” is dead? I expected my recent essay “Race Against Reason” to provoke an element of controversy and was not surprised when it elicited the following comment: Yes, this is all well and [...]
As St. John Henry Newman explains in his book “The Idea of a University,” education is the process by which a mind is formed not just to learn facts and ideas but to be able to think about how they are connected. And when Newman gives an image for that process, he points toward a [...]
Pope Pius, who had done more than anyone to make the Christian victory at Lepanto possible, is said to have burst into tears when news of it reached him. They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has [...]
It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I [...]
Two books about St. Francis: one by the protean English critic and one by an equally protean Greek. How, though, to treat their differences, especially since the books are unalike in length and fervency? St. Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton and Saint Francis by Nikos Kazantzakis So in this perilous grace of God With [...]
Barnacles do not often occupy the thoughts of landlubbers. Most people can go for weeks without thinking about them. It had been at least that long for me when I found in my files John Gardner’s marvelous 1990 address called “Personal Renewal.” Gardner begins his speech with an arresting quotation from an article he had [...]
The truth is not simply that all that is good, true and beautiful comes from heaven but that all goodness, truth and beauty points to heaven. We see heaven in the light of the heavenly overspill in which we find ourselves. They came to the top of a little ridge with fine views over the [...]