Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus

By |2024-03-17T08:59:03-05:00March 16th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Culture, History, Religion, Saint Patrick, Theology, Timeless Essays|

With my own hand I have written and put together these words to be given and handed on and sent to the soldiers of Coroticus. I cannot say that they are my fellow-citizens, nor fellow-citizens of the saints of Rome, but fellow-citizens of demons, because of their evil works. They are blood-stained: blood-stained with the [...]

Against Moral Progress

By |2024-03-08T19:20:31-06:00March 4th, 2024|Categories: Conservatism, Morality, Progressivism, Religion|

Morality only “progresses” as a phenomenon of gift, in which what is good and worth doing is seen as good and worth doing by a subsequent generation, which takes on the morality of their fathers and repeats it, as their own morality. But this means that progress in morality is never assured. It may not [...]

The Culture of Infinitude

By |2024-02-27T19:53:26-06:00February 27th, 2024|Categories: Freedom, Religion, Truth|

What’s needed at this juncture in our cultural evolution is a rebirth of healthy modesty about human being and human fate, a realization that we are imperfect and imperfectible, particular and embodied, with all our warts and blemishes, but for that very reason valuable beyond measure. Infinitude is an appealing concept to many, not mathematically, [...]

Belief and the Public Square

By |2024-02-25T14:13:37-06:00February 25th, 2024|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Communio, David L. Schindler, Essential, Faith, Featured, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Religion, Timeless Essays|Tags: , , , , |

Authentic human creativity offers an image of divine creativity. Its purpose-to bring about a civilization of love to give glory to God-can only be achieved when freedom is properly understood as the received gift by the Son from the Father. For David Schindler this trinitarian economy offers the only model by which any human economy, [...]

Religion & Celebrity: The Search for Meaning in the 1920s

By |2024-02-18T16:12:15-06:00February 18th, 2024|Categories: History, Religion, Science|

By the early decades of the twentieth century, at the very moment when physicists were dismantling formerly irrefutable truths about nature and the universe, science had become the foundation of the American faith in stability, order, and progress. Darwinian science had confirmed that the advent of the United States marked the apex of human evolution. [...]

Blind Benjamin Franklin

By |2024-01-16T19:15:44-06:00January 16th, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Franklin, Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, Religion, Timeless Essays|

Even today, many Americans take an intentionally anti-intellectual stance, agreeing with the rationalists that faith and reason are incompatible. Blind Benjamin Franklin is father to them all. Apart from his rejection of wigs and the incident with the kite, the key and the lightning bolt, I’m afraid I have never been impressed or attracted to [...]

Mark Twain’s “Joan of Arc”

By |2024-01-08T17:44:12-06:00January 8th, 2024|Categories: Books, Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Religion, Stephen Masty, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

“I studied that girl, Joan of Arc, for twelve years,” Mark Twain said, “and it never seemed to me that the artists and the writers gave us a true picture of her. They drew a picture of a peasant. But they always missed the face—the divine soul, the pure character, the supreme woman, the wonderful [...]

The Incarnation of Truth and Love

By |2023-12-24T23:27:09-06:00December 24th, 2023|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christmas, Love, Paul Krause, Reason, Senior Contributors, Theology, Timeless Essays|

The real claim of Christmas, for Christians, is that Truth and Love penetrated the cosmos. Christmas is a warm, loving, and tender season precisely for this reason. That warm fire, or bright sky, or joyful company, is made possible only because that God which ever lives and loves—to which the whole creation moves—entered the creation [...]

The Paradox of Choice

By |2023-12-13T15:58:03-06:00December 12th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Economics, Religion|

Our fundamental mistake is that we conflate freedom with a multiplicity of options. This view of freedom is actually paralyzing—we are enchained by our inability to make a decision. Thankfully, this is not how a Christian is expected to live! Ordering from a lengthy restaurant menu is a frightful experience. Your eyes scan desperately over countless [...]

Religion Without Consequences

By |2023-12-09T13:49:54-06:00December 9th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, John Horvat, Liberalism, Religion|

Consequential religion strikes fear in those who tragically have no faith. When they see that some believe firmly in a loving and Almighty God who takes an active role in worldly affairs, they sense the power of religion, and they suddenly become irrelevant. We live in times of inconsequential religion. That means most people do [...]

Reaching Into the Silence

By |2023-12-02T20:47:55-06:00December 2nd, 2023|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Religion, Theology|

Ours is a restless, noisy, superficial world terrified by silence, enthralled with politics, disdainful of interiority. The modern secular person looks out, perhaps even with pride, at its bleak utilitarian contours, blinking, yet slouching towards metaphysics. But the Catholic humanist, remembering with a certain grateful awe Gerard Manley Hopkins’ insight that "the world is charged [...]

The Great Banquet

By |2023-11-05T08:33:38-06:00November 4th, 2023|Categories: Books, Christendom, Religion, Theology|

Is there some legitimate historical prophecy to which we may turn? Christendom replies to this question with a clear Yes. Christendom, after all, counts among its sacred scriptures the prophetic Book of the Apocalypse. Hope and History, by Josef Pieper (106 pages, Cluny Media) Is there some legitimate historical prophecy to which we may turn? [...]

The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man

By |2023-10-21T14:24:59-05:00October 21st, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Essential, RAK, Religion, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Forgetting that there exists such a state as salutary dread, modern man has become spiritually foolhardy. The God-fearing man is rare. A Michigan farmer, some years ago, climbed to the roof of his silo, and there he painted, in great red letters that the Deity could see, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning [...]

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