If you are not praying, try to pray irregularly. If you are irregularly praying, try to pray regularly. If you are regularly praying, try to pray a bit more. And remember that wherever you are spiritually, God has not moved. It may seem obvious, but the first thing to say about the pursuit of deeper [...]
The poor, Jesus famously said, will always be with us. Jesus’ followers have often been accused of misusing these words of their Master as an excuse to ignore the systemic causes of poverty. Christians, the charge runs, have preached private benevolence as a substitute for the more arduous, and more courageous, task of fighting to change [...]
Reading books is already a niche activity. Our lives are not so much interrupted by as constituted of distractions. Sitting down to read a book requires elbowing everybody and everything aside. Last week, Mark Bauerlein of First Things wrote a witty invective against the National Council of Teachers of English for their most recent posturing—a [...]
Sin, on the whole, is choosing our will over God’s, and it leads to our greatest unhappiness, even if we don’t always realize it in the beginning. The darkness and mire of sin, however, melts away against the backdrop of the Father’s love. According to the National Catholic Register, “the Catholic jubilee has added spiritual [...]
Russell Kirk’s "Roots of American Order" rightly deserves its place as a conservative masterpiece. It is an ethical and moral history of Western civilization as it nurtured, shaped, and delimited American political culture. Written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Russell Kirk’s magisterial The Roots of American Order [...]
What does Tolkien mean by insinuating that centaurs and dragons are more “alive” than cars? Well, he is referring to the fact that centaurs and dragons are animate creatures, albeit animated only by the imagination. He seems also to be saying that subcreation in the service of goodness, truth and beauty is better than subcreation [...]
Understanding Beauty as Percy Bysshe Shelley does—as a principle, like Truth or Justice—should lie at the heart of any rigorously-developed classical curriculum that aims to inspire a new generation of poets, scientists, artists, and genuinely creative citizens. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”—perhaps one of his greatest works—is a wonderfully Platonic exploration of the [...]
Patriotism—the love of place, countrymen, and local traditions—lasted for millennia, until replaced by nationalism, which we believe is a natural outgrowth of tribal life, instead of an invention of Western Europe. I sat through elementary school not knowing that to guarantee new generations of virtuous and patriotic citizens, the French Revolution established the first comprehensive [...]
I needed the time away during my sabbatical, and through a special providence it was allowed for this sabbath to take place in Jerusalem during Holy Week, when the Redemption events are re-lived now two thousand years later in ways more vivid and life-changing than most can imagine. During the pandemic I was informed that, [...]
Alongside his poetry and the charming essays of family life and ordinary glory he has collected in other volumes, Jake Frost has now shown he is a teller of tales. In "The Light of Caliburn," he reminds us that though the legends of long ago are wreathed in smoke, the fire at their heart continues [...]
For Socrates, the best city will “track down the nature of what is fine and graceful, so that the young, dwelling as it were in a healthy place, will be benefited by everything. And from that place something of the fine works will strike their vision or their hearing, like a breeze bringing health from [...]
Absent joy, absent the vision and expectation of eternal happiness, we lose ourselves in the immediate. When we forget about our final end, we become absorbed in the means, in technique, in minutia.It is necessary to find our way back to joy, to rekindle that flame. Much ink has been spilled in distinguishing among the [...]
As we walk together into the Easter season I thought I would post again two sonnets reflecting on the encounter two disciples had with the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus. These two sonnets form part of a sequence of fifty sonnets on the sayings of Jesus called Parable and Paradox. They were published by [...]
As we bask in the glory of the Easter Octave, celebrating the Resurrection, it is a good time to consider how themes of resurrection have been a recurrent feature of literature throughout the ages. A good place to start is to see the Resurrection in terms of eucatastrophe, a word which Tolkien invented to indicate [...]