What is true of architecture, art, and music is equally true of literature. Throughout the history of Christendom, great literature has paid homage to sacred liturgy and the sacraments. Author's Note: On the evening of Wednesday, September 25 I was honoured to give the keynote address at the opening of the annual conference of the [...]
If we are faithful to God in small things, and offer our lives and all our actions more and more to the service of his divine will, he can and will accomplish untold good through our lives. One of my favorite prayers by Saint John Henry Newman begins: “God has created me to do Him [...]
Christopher Columbus is without a doubt responsible for the Columbian Exchange—which through human agency recreated the lost world of Pangea. But was Columbus the first to discover America? The memory—and especially the statues—of Christopher Columbus have taken quite the beating over the last half-century. The great Lakota activist, Russell Means, once called him worse than [...]
Kinship among nations is not determined in such measurements as proximity, size, and age. Rather, we should turn to those inner things, those intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess. To preserve his freedom of worship, his equality before the law, his liberty to speak and act as he sees fit, subject only [...]
If we really think of God as a Who and not a What—in other words, if we think of him as a Someone capable of speech, then there is no “security” against revelation. And man’s only meaningful response to revelation is faith! The Weight of Belief, by Josef Pieper (Cluny Media, 326 pages) The difficulty [...]
What John Henry Newman says about conscience shocks the modern secular sensibility, which treats it (if at all) as the “socially constructed” result of any number of cultural influences. The conscience is a messenger from God: giving saints courage to resist tyranny, even unto death. by Emmeline Deane, oil on canvas, 1889 The [...]
We are wired for stories, to make them, to know them, and to be formed by them. Story is everywhere, and is always the way out for meaning, especially the Ultimate Meaning, so that we may, though dimly, know Him who composes the tale, its main Character, and the One who continues to tell it. [...]
Christopher Dawson set himself the task of surveying the history of Western Civilization in the light of a master-idea: that religion is the dynamic force, the basic constituent and the inspiration of all higher human activity, and that therefore the culture of an era depends upon its religion. Looking back over the vast ruins and [...]
Distributism is the only practical solution to the problem of rampant corporatism and the globalism which is its inevitable consequence. Next time we raise a glass of craft-brewed ale, we should not merely enjoy its flavor, we should also raise a toast to the political and economic freedom that it represents. Some time ago I [...]
By linking it to the great moral issue of slavery, perhaps more people will find their way to the position that abortion too should be put on the road to ultimate extinction. If so, it’s possible that subsequent generations of Americans will come to regard our Stephen Douglas-popular sovereignty Republicans as having been on the [...]
When doctors have become dealers in death, we need to sing the praises of those noble physicians who have taken a courageous stand for the culture of life. Perhaps there is no better test of the health of a culture than the way that it treats its children. The Canaanites sacrificed their own infants to Moloch; [...]
Wilhelm Röpke maintained that freedom depends upon certain social and moral factors, which are essential for a free enterprise system to be successful, enduring, and truly free. A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, by Wilhelm Röpke, Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998. 200 pp. Wilhelm Röpke (in some texts spelled “Roepke”), [...]
Newman’s conversion in 1845, sixteen years after Catholic Emancipation and five years before the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England, heralded the birth of a Revival which would see the resurrection of the Faith in the English-speaking world. In September 2010, I was honoured to be invited to serve as an official commentator on [...]
Like every person, I live in two worlds: the temporal and the eternal. I now see that every person I meet in ordinary, daily affairs is part human and part divine, a storytelling self, often confused, dislikable, and in pain, but always transient, and a mysterious self, deathless, an image of God, worthy of unconditional [...]