Why is it that prayer is fundamental to politics? Politics exists to secure the common good. An essential element of the common good is that man should be able to fulfill himself at all levels. The religious level cannot be excluded. The civilization in which we find ourselves makes prayer difficult. The first thing that [...]
To curse God is not to resolve the suffering, but to give in to it, to make despair the beginning and ending of the universe. But God is bigger than the universe and all the suffering that occurs within it. In the end, all will be set to rights when the one who condemns becomes [...]
Why is seeing "Pride and Prejudice" as Jane Austen saw it so important? The answer is simple enough. She knows the work better than anyone else. Jane Austen might be the greatest of all women novelists. Certainly, there are few others who can reasonably be said to deserve such an accolade. One thinks perhaps of [...]
The necessity of personal morality in a thriving community is denied by the enemies of the permanent things, who do not believe that there are permanent standards of behavior or indeed an unchanging human nature, and who seek to create political systems that will make everyone happy without much effort. Enemies of the Permanent Things: [...]
What was it about the temptation to Manichaeism, the allure it offered a young man like Augustine, that proved so powerful, so seductive that it nearly did him in? The trouble with Manichaeism, some wag once wrote, is that it won’t let you eat a Big Mac. At least not without having to bear a [...]
For the past quarter of a century I’ve been honoured to edit the St. Austin Review, popularly known as the StAR, a Catholic cultural journal, published six times a year. The StAR was launched in September 2001, the month of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. It appeared in the midst of that darkest of months as [...]
The absence of beauty in education robs students of their natural curiosity, intuition, and creativity. Beauty provides direction, order, and harmony. Humans are made to desire and perceive beauty, which itself is the mystery of God. Professor Margarita Mooney of Princeton Theological Seminary and the Scala Foundation is a dear friend and brilliant academic. Five [...]
If we are to recover “the moral ideal” and if we are to be reconsecrated to the life of the spirit, we are in urgent need of an unconditional conservatism: lean, ascetical, disciplined, prophetic, unswerving in its censorial task, strenuous in its mission, strong in its faith, faithful in its dogma, pure in its metaphysic. [...]
R. Emmett Tyrrell’s short version of American history from the 1960s to the 2020s can essentially be reduced to this: periods of Episodic Chaos followed by periods of Episodic Calm. In his recent book, he asks whether we can finally be free of these alternating historical episodes. How Do We Get Out of Here? by [...]
The 22nd of July is Mary Magdalene’s day, and continuing my sequence of sonnets written in response to the church year I post this for her. As usual you can hear the poem by clicking on its title or on the ‘play’ button. This sonnet is drawn from my collection Sounding the Seasons, published by Canterbury Press [...]
Fr. Michael Ward believes that each of the seven chronicles of Narnia can be seen to echo the seven planets of medieval cosmology in their themes, characters, and mood. In The Narnia Code, Father Michael Ward has abridged and made more accessible Planet Narnia, his doctoral thesis on C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. The Narnia [...]
Decadence ultimately entails the process of falling away from the vision that orders man's relation to the divine, to the community, to the self, to nature. In the Western context, it signifies a lessening of the hold on the imagination of all that inspires human beings to be devout. Through the ages the death of [...]
It can be seen how St Francis was able to see, not just with such clarity, but in poetry and in technicolor what St Paul originally called “God’s Secret Plan”, and to see the way to enter into it by entering through Love into the one who embodied it in his mystical body. I have [...]
A look at four more unsung heroes from the Australian continent, including the great Frank Sheed! In the previous essay in this series, we focused on two heroic Australian Catholics who witnessed to the Faith in their defense of the dignity of the human person. In this chapter, we will celebrate four other Australians whose heroism [...]