The one thing every American shares is that we are immigrants, and this gives birth to our self-reliance, our willingness to risk tomorrow on faith, and our freedom from many of the cultural straitjackets found back in the Old Country. It’s all there in the art. All either necessary for immigration or fostered by it… [...]
Edmund Burke believed in change, knowing that a nation unwilling or unable to change would collapse. However, he believed in prudence, moderation, moral restraint, and gradual implementation with reflective assessment. Had modern Europeans believed in the same things, they would not be in this predicament now… “All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the [...]
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back Guilty of dust and sin. […]
Religious dogma is true— indispensably true—but Truth is truer, and bigger than dogma in the same way that a map is true, but the journey is truer and bigger than the map… Editor’s Note: This essay is an abridged version of a chapter in Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s book The Romance of Religion. When I was [...]
Modestly, without arrogance or triumphalism, our graduates will be the mustard seeds of cultural transformation… Graduation is always a bittersweet time, because we have come to know the students so well, from many different sides. It is not a matter of delving into their privacy, but of seeing them in different contexts—classes, outdoor trips, liturgical [...]
At dusk I was about going to hunt up my brother Morris, when he came to me. Thank God, we are both safe as yet. We laid all night among the dead Yankees, but they did not disturb our peaceful slumbers. July 1 We left camp at 6 A.M., passed through Heidelsburg and Middleton. At [...]
Religion shaped the Inklings as much or even more than did whatever generational zeitgeist one might want to attribute to the group… Though not the best-known Inkling, Adam Fox had the privilege of being the first of the group to arrive in this world. Through no choice of his own, he appeared on July 13, [...]
For Christians caught in the crossfire between Islamist and “Islamophobic” hatred, the only choice is to take the Mercutio option, refusing to take sides in a heartless and headless feud and calling down a plague upon both hate-filled parties… What is the world coming to? More specifically, what is my own country of England coming [...]
Through reading the works of Charles Dickens, we may be inspired to take a closer look at our own priorities and come to a deeper understanding of our inability to embody perfectly our own ideals. Throughout the career of the esteemed literary giant Charles Dickens, selfless love as opposed to selfishness served as an underlying [...]
Christianity is expected to reach, through the human and divine agency of its members, each human being at the core reality in his soul, at the reality of the choice where each person makes himself to be what he chooses to be within the initial givenness of his being… It was God who reconciled us [...]
How do employee-owned companies fare in the wider economy? How do they compete in the dog-eat-dog world of business?… Many years ago, back in England and long before my conversion, I stumbled upon a book called The Man Who Gave His Company Away. It was a biography of Ernest Bader, a very successful entrepreneur in [...]
The 29th of June is St. Peter’s day, when we remember the disciple who, for all his many mistakes, knew how to recover and hold on, who, for all his waverings, was called by Jesus "the rock," and who learned the threefold lesson that every betrayal can ultimately be restored by love. It is fitting [...]
"I like your interest in sports ball, chiefest of all base-ball particularly: base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a [...]
As Paul Gottfried explains in “Revisions and Dissents,” the real division between right and left cuts not between finance capitalists and welfare statists, but “between those who wish to preserve inherited communities and their sources of authority and those who wish to ‘reform’ or abolish these arrangements.” Complaints about Donald Trump’s “divisiveness” strike Paul Gottfried [...]