“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 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 [...]
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 [...]
Christopher Nolan’s rightly celebrated movie is not what you expect to see. It uses the life and times of the father of the atomic bomb to denounce a world made wretched by the lack of truth. And T.S. Eliot becomes a seer of hope, prophesying that, before the nuke-metaphor explodes, there is still a chance [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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? [...]
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 [...]
Pope Pius, who had done more than anyone to make the Christian victory at Lepanto possible, is said to have burst into tears when news of it reached him. They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has [...]
Understood properly, October purges us of our follies and reminds us that death hovers just in front of us. It reminds us that we always stand in time, but at the very edge of eternity. The autumnal coolness—just on the edge of the dying summer—is in the air, and it feels good. Very cool, very [...]
In the world of statistics, sufficiency plays an important role in estimation. But what about sufficiency in other aspects of our lives? What about God? What about my eternal destiny? What is sufficient, here and now, to know all that I can know about my purpose in this world and my fate when my time here [...]
The prevalent tendency in our society to overestimate individual freedom is wreaking havoc on personal happiness and threatening to bring down Western culture. This culture is built on a Judeo-Christian foundation and it will not survive the dismantling of that foundation. Fr. Longenecker concludes his interview with author and friend of René Girard with a [...]
We are in a civilizational crisis, one that is the outworking of anthropological mistakes that have long festered. Increasingly in the history of Western culture we have forgotten or ignored or misconstrued, not only mimesis, but what is perhaps the most essential fact of human existence, namely, religious longing. Theologian Gil Bailie was a personal [...]
There I, a convinced atheist, stood alone in a sandy and windy world, devoid of water, trees, or anything that seemed to be alive. And I couldn’t help but wonder what madness had overcome me. The most fateful university holiday I ever experienced was way back in February 1988. Yes, during that magical and mystical [...]