Let us consider the case of a man who is facing a difficult decision—a decision, let us say, which will affect me. This decision involves a matter of some importance, and so I am deeply concerned that the man should make the right decision—right, suitable, impartial, just. I am not certain that he will in [...]
I have sought since my conversion to use the gifts that God has given me to glorify Him and to bring souls to Him, in contrast to the way that I had previously used those same gifts to glorify hatred and to lead souls astray. I’m in receipt of correspondence from a young woman, received [...]
In a world and at a time when men have discarded the idea of intellectual truth, it is through the soul and in the imagination that they can, and must, be reached. In a recent address to the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, Cardinal Raymond Burke called for a return to Summorum Pontificum and greater access [...]
Most of all, I think of how America opened its arms to my family in the late-nineteenth century. It's a timeless story. Unless you’re 100% American Indian, you exist today in America because someone in your family immigrated here. It’s one of the most amazing stories in the history of the world. A week ago, [...]
The adoption of the Declaration of Independence of “the thirteen united States of America” on July 4, 1776 formally ended a process that had been set in motion almost as soon as colonies were established in what became British North America. The early settlers, once separated physically from the British Isles by an immense ocean, [...]
The revolution that William F. Buckley, Jr., set into motion itself remains far from complete. In truth, and in Buckley’s mind, the main idea was actually to create a counter-establishment that would eventually produce not a revolution, but a “counter-revolution.” Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus (1018 pages, Random [...]
The founding of nations always involves a willful forgetting and subsequent divinization of the founding fathers. The Scriptures are an acid that dissolves every attempt to produce an untainted origin story, and so a new nation. Throughout his City of God, Augustine accuses the Romans of willfully forgetting their origins. The philosopher Varro, Augustine says, [...]
Perhaps the Mount Sinai of the Bible is not the traditional site located in Egypt, but another mountain in modern Saudi Arabia, whose volcanic nature would help explain the miracles described in Exodus. Last month it was reported that the ancient monastery of St Catherine at Mt Sinai is to be nationalized by the Egyptian [...]
In 1900, Jean Sibelius revised his patriotic tone-poem, “Finlandia,” and its popularity grew in leaps and bounds. Suddenly the world knew about Sibelius, “Finlandia,” and Finnish national pride. Jean Sibelius Jean Sibelius’ tone-poem, Finlandia, wasn’t supposed to be the program headliner that Saturday night at the San Francisco Symphony. The main draw was the Sibelius Violin [...]
Who would have thought that so much philosophy could be found in such little poetry? Who would have thought that so much could be said in so few words? Next time you read Shakespeare, read carefully, and you may find more philosophy than first meets the eye. We have recently celebrated the feast of Corpus [...]
The very excess of our present paganism may warrant some hope that it will not long endure; for usually excess generates its opposite. One of the most regular sequences in history is that a period of pagan license is followed by an age of puritan restraint and moral discipline. So the moral decay of ancient [...]
Though Handel continues to loom large in the world of classical music, he is valued for a small portion of his tremendous body of work—mainly "Messiah" and a handful of other pieces. But I continue to find fresh gems from this composer who, for all his fame, is not really all that well known. I [...]
Augustine, of course, was not the first to chart the cycle of lust, as anyone for whom the body/soul connection remains a work in progress well knows. I must now carry my thoughts back to the abominable things I did in those days,” writes Augustine at the very beginning of Book II, “the sins of the [...]
In reflecting on the lives of Fr. Gereon Goldmann and Dr. Takashi Nagai, and the era of war in which they lived, I was struck by how the Catholic faith—when truly lived with dedication—surpasses any national or ethnic enmity. It unites any and all in a universal goodness, mercy, wisdom, and love. While Germany and [...]