It is not fair or accurate to describe the struggle between the two warring parties in Ukraine as religious, except in the decidedly irreligious sense of its being a sectarian struggle in which religious affiliation is little more than a badge worn in the service of tribalism. A couple of nights ago, I found myself [...]
The case of Naomi Wolf is a sign of our sinister times. We do not know whether she will develop her faith and embrace Church teachings. Such conversions are best left in the hands of God, Whose ways are mysterious and inscrutable. However, her desperate plea for help against the principalities and powers of darkness [...]
Though Solzhenitsyn feared the consequences of an independent Ukraine, he respected the right of the Ukrainian people to secede, a right which they duly exercised as the former Soviet Union unraveled. Reiterating his subsidiarist principles he insisted once again that “only the local population can decide the fate of their locality, of their region.” Alexander [...]
Customs and outward forms signal that one’s duty is greater than one’s self, and neglect of them is an exercise in egotism. Accounts vary, and a few say that the story about our civil Founders is apocryphal, but it would seem that the story is true. As one of the more jovial national patriarchs, Gouverneur Morris, [...]
St. Benedict found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time, or by any rare specific, or by any series of strokes, but [...]
George Washington was respected, admired, even revered by his countrymen, and he was the most trusted man of the age. What is more, and different, he was the most trustworthy man. The question of why this is so must be examined if we are to understand Washington’s true legacy. The men who established the American [...]
Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy. President Gerald R. Ford, Remarks at His Swearing-In Ceremony, August 9, 1974 My dear friends, my fellow Americans: The oath that [...]
Léo Delibes’ “Flower Duet” is utterly transporting. It’s so pure, the only thing you can compare it to is the finest of champagnes, the way the first sip makes you feel. What is so irresistible about Delibes’ music is his ability to apply colorful orchestration, harmonic dexterity, delicious rhythms, in a fully fleshed-out symphonic sound [...]
C.S. Lewis wrote prophetically about the Abolition of Man. We are witnessing its literal fulfillment. If history unfolds in 500-year epochs, then we are on the cusp of a new epoch. What does it hold for humanity? I have not been the only one to recognize that the last five hundred years have been an [...]
Belief in the objective existence of the world outside ourselves, the world to which we submit our thought, is our deepest inheritance. Last Thursday, Bishop Steven Biegler of the Diocese of Cheyenne came to Wyoming Catholic College to bless our new Immaculate Conception Oratory—“new,” at least, in our use of it. As I have mentioned [...]
Let us offer to the young some clear years for becoming not a this or a that, but for learning to be a human being, whose powers of thought are well exercised, whose imagination is well stocked, whose will has conceived some large human purpose, and whose passions have found some fine object of love [...]
Strange though it might seem at one level, our Lord seems to have been a general contractor. Or perhaps it is not strange. After all, if he is indeed the Word by whom the Father created all things, it is perhaps fitting that he would do in miniature what he does at the level of [...]
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" shows us the true face of Pride. It shows us that those who choose a life of Pride are condemning themselves to a self-delusional and self-destructive existence. Hoodwinked by the nihilistic falsehood of relativism, they spend their increasingly meaningless days in a Dorian daze. Literature can throw a penetrating light [...]
Music’s purity and detachment from other fields of activity means that it is has a purifying effect on the soul. It frees us from captivity to the world of things and from history, ideology, and politics, and raises us to an experience of pure emotional and spiritual states. Music is often claimed to be—and valued [...]