In Welsh, “Capel-y-Ffin” means “chapel at the boundaries.” It is an apt name, not only because of its location in the border land between Wales and England, but also because it is a place where the boundaries between religion and reality, monasticism and morality, chastity and carnality, and (it must be said) sanity and insanity [...]
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. [...]
From the moment of hearing those opening notes, everything in me scrambled and resettled, catapulting me back to 1978. Then, like now, it amazed me how immersive it all was, from the moment the clarinets, accompanied by the softest of strings, set off on their journey, like an enormous ship leaving the pier on a [...]
Consider Jesus hanging on the cross. Observe the cuts on his body from being scourged and violently stripped of his clothes. See the gashes made from falling under the weight of his heavy cross. Notice the torn flesh of his pierced hands and feet. Look him in the eyes as blood drips down his face. [...]
For a thousand years, liberal education shaped the moral imagination of succeeding generations, almost unaware that it was freeing them from the coercive obsessions of their political masters. Reading classics like Anne of Green Gables, Farmer Boy, or To Kill a Mockingbird, some parents meditate on the adolescents portrayed—teenagers eager to master the virtues of [...]
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 [...]
Longer-lived than most composers, Georg Philipp Telemann was still creating and experimenting in his 80s, ready to welcome the new Classical era represented by Haydn and Mozart. In some ways Telemann was the key composer of the high Baroque era, one who amalgamated all the styles of the day in a style that reflected geniality, [...]
In the deadliest century of human history, these women heroically stood for life. Of all the many dark centuries in the history of Christendom, there is no denying that the 20th century was one of the darkest. It was also the deadliest. In terms of the sheer body count, the last century, with its wars of [...]
C.S. Lewis’s range of work—at a very high level, done with pellucid clarity and frequent epigrammatic wit—places him at, or near, the top of literary figures writing in English since the seventeenth century. In a recent issue of The Spectator (August 2025), Alexander Laman treated us to “Still Roaring,” a left-handed recognition of the staying [...]
Our Blessed Mother wants nothing more for us than to have a true relationship with her Son. In the current storm of misinformation, our Lady acts as a shield to protect the orthodoxy of our faith that keeps our eyes and hearts fixed on Christ. After a previous attempt, I wish to promote another title for [...]
Grace alone determines whether we go to Heaven or Hell. But our good works determine whether we go through purgation or not, en route to Heaven. November 2 is the feast of All Souls. The point of the day is to remember those who have gone before us—but not necessarily the saints (those in Heaven). [...]
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 [...]
It makes no sense to reward someone who frustrates the purposes of literature with a major prize. Imagine literary works with plots in dystopian settings where the characters act within an unraveling social order. Apocalyptic events abound inside absurd situations. This is the literature of Laszlo Krasznakorkai. There is more. Imagine an unreadable and drawn-out [...]