Remember that Halloween is simply the eve of All Hallows, All Saints Day, which is followed by All Souls Day on the Christian calendar. Death, and one’s own future death in particular, ought to be remembered, but not as a morbid fascination. Rather, it should be meditated on as the inevitable gateway to eternal life [...]
What is this fear of spiders? There is a natural fear of venomous creatures, but the spider’s venom is not the only threat. She spins a web. She entraps her prey. She wraps them tightly to eat them later. As the ghost in Hamlet cries about his own venomous murder: “O Horrible, O horrible, most [...]
Just as the joy I have on account of the good of my friend depends on how much I love that friend, so too is that the case with the saints. To be closer friends with the saints, we must grow in our love for the saints, and then we will be able to share [...]
Was the immense popularity of the 1960s television series "Dark Shadows" some sort of cry for help during a decade of brutish violence and social sickness? After all, its central character Barnabas Collins was a vampire with moral compunction. I recently finished watching all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the campy gothic soap opera that [...]
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 [...]
So who was this John C. Calhoun, someone who has so many sticky burrs attached to his reputation? And why turn our attention to him in this year of 2025? I. Constitutional Federalism Is a system whereby a written constitution divides and shares powers between a General Government and constituent state governments with each having [...]
Love draws you up, but it does not sweep you off your feet. Not yet. Charity paradoxically manages to give you both heaven and earth. Jesus, Paul, and indeed all Christians, keep their sights high and their feet firmly planted. Saint Paul can catch you off guard. Just when you think you have a grip [...]
The ultimate job of the teacher is to help orient students to and deepen their intimacy with reality itself. And the indispensable condition for a teacher being able to do this is not expertise, experience, knowledge, or pedagogical technique, however important these are, but literally being in love with the good. How do we enable [...]
A martyr of Communist Russia, Mother Catherine of Siena, founded a convent of Third Order Dominicans before being sentenced to more than a decade of solitary confinement. It has been said, purportedly by G.K. Chesterton, that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing but in anything. Even worse is that the [...]
Henry Clay and Sam Rayburn fit well with Willmoore Kendall’s views of the democratic statesman. Both were skilled politicians who sought the good, avoided extremism, and consciously represented the people in Congress. For many centuries, scholars have written weighty tomes on statesmanship. In the twentieth century in particular, many students of the American political philosopher [...]
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 [...]
The priest or religious who takes a vow of Chastity, binding them to Christ as to their spiritual married partner, will be lost without daily access to the contemplation that is for them the indispensable means of uniting them with him. From the very beginning, the faithful have been taught that the Church is the [...]
[Jesus] went down with [Joseph and Mary] and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart. (Luke 2:51) If you ever find yourself walking around the side chapels in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, you may come across various depictions of the four Gospel writers. And [...]
Dale Ahlquist's "I Also Had My Hour" stands the art of autobiography on it head so that we can see G.K. Chesterton afresh from new angles, much as Chesterton himself stood truth on its head so that we could see it afresh from new angles. I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G. [...]