Like another John the Baptist, the preacher makes straight the way of the Lord. Using human means and human words, God is pleased to bring about the salvation of his people. St. John Paul II was a preacher. This is part of a series entitled, “Preaching: Feeding Fellow Beggars.” Read the series introduction here. To see [...]
Poland’s reforms and constitution, Edmund Burke thought, offered real meaning, much closer to the experience of the American Revolution than that of the French Revolution. In significant ways, the Polish king succeeded because he embraced the laws of nature and “the array of Justice” without forcing anything of his own will upon his people. Stanislaw [...]
The positive secular reviews that have come in for my off-Broadway verse drama, "Death Comes for the War Poets," show the power of art to touch hearts even in enemy territory, in the secular art community of New York City, that most “woke” of communities in that most “woke” of cities. This shows the evangelizing [...]
Christopher Owen tells Willmoore Kendall’s story in an interesting way that keeps the reader’s attention while conveying Kendall’s struggles that led to his evolution of thought and conservative philosophy. In our time when populist ideals are on the rise, this book is required reading to understand what it means to be conservative. Heaven Can Indeed [...]
Ridley Scott’s TV adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle came to Amazon in November, and bluntly put, it’s a horrifying ten hours. The premise says it all: What if the Allies had lost World War II? We see America divided between a Nazi regime in the east and a Japanese empire [...]
The United Kingdom’s Labour Party government is presenting a bill to abolish the hereditary lords from the upper chamber of Parliament. Hereditary lords are those House of Lords’ members who inherit the right to sit in the upper House based on services rendered to the realm. Many storied families have retained this right for generations. [...]
The Church cannot continue to transform and humanize the world if she dispenses with the beauty of the liturgy. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the [...]
D.G. Hart perceptively notes that Benjamin Franklin was not a Deist, as popular memory claims, but rather a "cultural Protestant." As such, he "applied much of what Protestants taught about work and study in the secular world without accepting all that the churches taught about the world to come." Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant (270 pages, [...]
Perhaps you looked back over your year and rejoiced. Maybe it was a bitter one, and you can’t wait to get 2024 in the rearview mirror. Or maybe the review process just made you cringe: you looked at that treadmill you bought in January and wondered at what point it became a coat rack. Whether [...]
Professional historians have no special expertise. In the study of the past, there is no difference between a professional and an amateur historian. If they put their minds to the task, even untutored undergraduates might discover a more profound truth about the past than their learned professor, the limits of their knowledge notwithstanding. Historians All! [...]
Before He was born as Christ the King on earth, He was “born” in the “mind” and “heart” of God as Christ the King in Heaven. He was firstly born in eternity before time began, so that the glory that reigned in Heaven could also reign on earth, in Him. However, if God’s Son was [...]
In a true search for Christ, we cannot but find ourselves with Mary at our side. To be with her is to be at Nazareth as every hope is made true at the angel’s message, to be in Bethlehem as the Lord is manifested to the world, to be at Cana as his miracles pour [...]
T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” is as sincere a conversion poem as one can have it: No fancy light shining down from the heavens or a thunderous call to holiness; just one small event that left a Magus perplexed by a new worldview that was unsettling and strange, for it put into question [...]
To anyone who feels beaten down by the bleakness of the world around us, my advice is this: seek to rise above the soundbites and thought-clichés of journalism, politics, and academia. Instead, inquire about the truth from the great tradition. Keep the sabbath, cultivate the soul and the mind, study nature. Maintain that flame of [...]