Gratitude—both gratitude to the human persons around us and the ultimate gratitude toward the personal God—brings to us a sense of order and peace, a grounding in truth that sets us free. Gratitude, by Dietrich von Hildebrand, Balduin V. Schwarz, Joseph Ratzinger, and Romano Guardini (135 pages, Hildebrand Project, 2023) The great spiritual teachers tell [...]
Gratitude remains the only key that unshackles us and lets us breathe free. We all unthinkingly use the phrase “the gift of life,” but it is only a gift if we really think of it as such. Myth is not fiction. Myth is truth that ignores the facts. Myths are the tales we tell each [...]
Keeping before us the countless ways God has blessed us, allows us to keep our focus on him, the God who infinitely loves us and who is with us through our greatest joys and our deepest sorrows. “Remember the marvels he has done” (Ps 105:5). Remember. Last year, when I was a novice, the novice master [...]
On Thanksgiving, I wish to cherish G.K. Chesterton’s magnanimity for our fellow, but often frustrating, man. He said, “We need a rally of the really human things; will which is morals, memory which is tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers.” What follows is a cornucopia of aphorisms and excerpts from a [...]
(Written to be read aloud, if so be, Thanksgiving Day) I remember here by the fire, In the flickering reds and saffrons, They came in a ramshackle tub, Pilgrims in tall hats, Pilgrims of iron jaws, Drifting by weeks on beaten seas, And the random chapters say They were glad and sang to God. [...]
In a season of disharmony, discord, distrust, and disorder, it is often painful to stop, to pause, and to give oneself distance enough to consider what must be recognized as good, and true, and beautiful, even in what seems a cesspool of existence. To give thanks, though, is not only necessary, it is salubrious! In [...]
Why does the mystery of D.B. Cooper, who on November 24, 1971 committed the only unsolved airline hijacking in history, continue to fascinate us? On the evening of November 24, 1971—the day before Thanksgiving—a dark-haired man dressed in a black raincoat, dark suit and thin, black tie, white shirt, and brown loafers approached the Northwest [...]
The Mayflower Compact is the first real assertion of the right to self-governance in the modern Western world and one of the most important in any time. On the first day of our spring semester, at the little liberal arts college at which I teach, I have for the last fourteen years had the joy [...]
Lord, Thou hast given me a cell Wherein to dwell, A little house, whose humble roof Is weather-proof: Under the spars of which I lie Both soft, and dry; […]
The word for truth in Greek means the absence of forgetting—the sudden recollection, the vivid recovery. In the great tradition of the West, when those who study it retrieve immense and priceless knowledge from forgetfulness, we find the hope of renewal. As we approach Thanksgiving this year, the coronavirus phenomenon helps us value rightly what [...]
On Thanksgiving Day, we remember with reverence and gratitude the bountiful blessings afforded to us by our Creator, and we recommit to sharing in a spirit of thanksgiving and generosity with our friends, neighbors, and families. Nearly four centuries ago, determined individuals with a hopeful vision of a more prosperous life and an abundance of opportunities made [...]
A lighthearted romp at first blush, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” yet tells the story of how the example of simple goodness can be transformational. The category of “Thanksgiving movies” is a select one indeed, but it is not meant as faint praise to crown John Hughes’ 1987 film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the greatest Thanksgiving [...]
To be truly grateful means that one holds oneself in the grace of owing. It means alert and noble attention to the good intended by the giver. Giving thanks is such a beautifully natural gesture that it seems almost perverse to admire someone for not making it. But Dr. Samuel Johnson earns such admiration in [...]
Whereas the Honourable the General Congress, impressed with a grateful sense of the goodness of Almighty God, in blessing the greater part of this extensive continent with plentiful harvests, crowning our arms with repeated successes, conducting us hitherto safely through the perils with which we have been encompassed and manifesting in multiplied instances his divine care [...]