‘He Was a Great Soul’: Remembering David L. Schindler

By |2023-07-18T00:16:38-05:00November 26th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Communio, David L. Schindler|

David L. Schindler was more than a towering intellect, more even than a mentor or an intellectual father. He was a great soul—a magnanimous man in the Aristotelean sense—generous, good, funny, alive, really larger than life. It is why he was so fiercely beloved by generations of students and why he affected so many lives [...]

We Are Not Our Own: Childhood in a Technological Age

By |2023-08-19T08:31:18-05:00November 17th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Communio, David L. Schindler, Essential, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Humanum, Pope Benedict XVI, St. John Paul II, Timeless Essays|

Jesus makes becoming like children a condition for entrance into heaven and hence for the everlasting participation in divine life to which we are all invited. The human being is not only to begin as a child, as it were, but also to end as one. Liberal culture’s anti-child practices are bound up with a [...]

Social Media *Is* Hate Speech: A Platonic Reflection on Contemporary Misology

By |2023-08-19T09:00:56-05:00July 21st, 2022|Categories: Civilization, Communio, Humanum, Plato, Social Media, Western Tradition|

The evident chaos of the contemporary “cancel culture”—which is coming to resemble something like a cyber version of The Terror in late 18th-century France during which the revolutionaries began cutting off even their own heads—is due to an abuse of language. There is a profound sort of cultural suicide occurring in this phenomenon. We are [...]

The Poverty of Liberal Economics

By |2022-05-01T08:17:24-05:00April 30th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Communio, David L. Schindler, Economics, Essential, Free Markets, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Second Spring, Timeless Essays|

The poor, Jesus famously said, will always be with us. Jesus’ followers have often been accused of misusing these words of their Master as an excuse to ignore the systemic causes of poverty. Christians, the charge runs, have preached private benevolence as a substitute for the more arduous, and more courageous, task of fighting to change [...]

Religious Liberty and the Reality of the Christian Tradition

By |2023-08-19T09:01:50-05:00March 17th, 2022|Categories: American Republic, Christianity, Communio, Essential, Freedom of Religion, Humanum, St. Augustine|

Christ assumed the whole of humanity in his assumption of the individual human nature received from and through his mother Mary. Politics is about the final end of human existence, and so politics has an essential relation to the Christian claim. The claim cannot be avoided; it can only be affirmed or denied. When thinking [...]

The Crisis of Fatherhood

By |2021-06-19T18:48:12-05:00June 19th, 2021|Categories: Christianity, Communio, Family, Featured, Stratford Caldecott, Timeless Essays|

The recovery of fatherhood is not merely a political and sociological challenge, to be met by strengthening the legislation that keeps families together, deters separation, and insists that a man takes more responsibility for his children. What needs to be recovered is a vision, a sense of responsibility, a “creative vow.” The collapse of marriage in [...]

The Truth About Political Correctness

By |2020-06-22T00:56:14-05:00July 16th, 2019|Categories: Communio, Equality, Politics, Reason, Senior Contributors, Stratford Caldecott, Truth|

Political correctness is philosophical nonsense. What we need is Justice not just Equality, Moral Responsibility not just Freedom, Intelligence not just Reason, and Charity not just Niceness or Fraternity—even if these don’t sound so good on a banner. Political correctness identifies a syndrome we all recognize, but is hard to define. It can be best [...]

Mercy as a Reality Illuminated by Reason

By |2022-08-10T15:51:45-05:00December 26th, 2018|Categories: Catholicism, Charity, Christian Humanism, Communio, David L. Schindler, Pope Francis|

In his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium [EG], Pope Francis insists that we need to anchor our approach to the Church’s missionary task in the Incarnate Word as the principle of reality (“il criterio di realtà”: 233). This principle can be a guide for “the development of life in society and the building of a people,” [...]

Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity

By |2022-11-17T19:43:14-06:00December 19th, 2018|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Communio, David L. Schindler, Politics|

Granted that the right to religious freedom is founded in the dignity of the human person, on what does the dignity of the human person itself finally rest, and how does one’s conception of these foundations affect the nature of the right? Can one assert a civil right to religious freedom without thereby at least [...]

The Given as Gift

By |2022-12-18T20:48:47-06:00December 12th, 2018|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Communio, David L. Schindler, Philosophy, Science|

What is entailed by the original nature of the creature as gift? The crucial point is that the relation to God that establishes the creature in its own being, and indeed that implies a shared relation of each creature with all other creatures, is truly in the creature. What the creature most basically is, is [...]

The Embodied Person as Gift

By |2020-09-06T11:19:21-05:00December 5th, 2018|Categories: Christian Humanism, Communio, Culture, David L. Schindler, Natural Law|

The body in its physical structure as such bears a vision of reality: it is an anticipatory sign, and already an expression, of the order of love or gift that most deeply characterizes the meaning of the person and indeed, via an adequately conceived analogy, the meaning of all creaturely being. This is the burden [...]

The Return of Christian Humanism

By |2022-03-17T17:39:50-05:00August 3rd, 2017|Categories: Books, Christianity, Communio, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, Pope Benedict XVI, T.S. Eliot|Tags: , |

Even when addressing non-Christians, Christian humanism’s willing receptiveness of the supernatural opens itself to the truths of revelation and of the human religious experience, allowing it to speak intimately and truthfully to the whole person… The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History by Lee Oser (University of Missouri Press, [...]

Philosopher of Love: David Schindler

By |2021-08-12T02:13:43-05:00October 9th, 2016|Categories: Christianity, Communio, Culture, David L. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Timeless Essays|

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Jeremy Beer as he explores the philosophy of David Schindler, especially as it concerns love and freedom. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher For the orthodox Christian, is doing one’s public duty more or less reducible to voting for the most socially conservative [...]

Is Totalitarian Liberalism a Mutant Form of Christianity?

By |2022-03-31T18:09:52-05:00May 22nd, 2016|Categories: Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Communio, Pope Benedict XVI, Timeless Essays, Tracey Rowland, Tyranny, Western Civilization|

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Tracey Rowland as she examines the dangers to the family if political leaders are allowed to act as God. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher When the Obama Administration began its Kulturkampf against American Catholics, my husband suggested to me that if the [...]

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