Virtue

The Paradox of Courage

What does courage actually look like? Why is it that many who can face mortal dangers in battle lack the other virtues? How do you account for a man like Cicero, whose voice trembled at the beginning of every speech and who never distinguished himself in battle,...

The Dark Side of Normal

Sin is the most normal thing of all throughout the ages of human experience. It is far more normal than virtue. There are always far more sinners than there are saints... “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult;...

Applying the Principle of Subsidiarity to the Debt Crisis

Until individuals, families, institutions, and government are restored to their proper roles, America will continue crashing through the debt ceiling... It is official: The national debt has now exceeded $21 trillion. The tragic news comes just six months...

Unbought Grace

The qualities that I would love most of all to see in all our students could not be better described than by Edmund Burke’s account of the chivalric demeanor: "that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself,...

A Christian Solution to the Tariff Question

Economics alone will not provide the answer to the tariff question. We need to address the superior side of man’s nature, which is spiritual. When this spiritual side is addressed, it guides and gives rise to political, social, cultural, and economic solutions in sync with human nature...

Dante: The Exile Who Leads Us Home

Dante reminded us that this world is good, as far it goes, but it is not the ultimate. We love this land well, but not as the final resting place for our bones. We are exiles until the New Heaven and the New Earth...

Criminal Character and Mercy

Is it not refined cruelty to keep alive, in self-loathing, a man who is a grave danger to the innocent and a grisly horror to himself? And to do such a thing in countries long admired for the justice of their laws?...

Wounded Beauty

Why should the sins of the guilty cause suffering to the guiltless? If God could prevent such suffering of the innocent victims of sin but refrains from doing so, isn’t he also to blame? Isn’t he in some way an accessory to the sin? In other words,...

Needed: Churchmen of Courage

Where there are bishops of moral vigor, there will be an abundance of young men willing to take up the call of service to the Church. Where the spirit is tepid and refreshes itself on the thin broth of a domesticated and politically correct Gospel, seminaries will...

Perpetrating a Freud on Sophocles and Shakespeare

After tainting Oedipus, Sigmund Freud goes even further in his defaming of virtuous characters in literature, dragging the noble Hamlet through the same ignoble mire of his smutty, sex-obsessed imagination... The ignorant pronounce it Frood, to cavil or applaud. The well-informed pronounce it Froyd, But I pronounce it Fraud. —G.K. Chesterton...

How Do We Save Our Souls From the Modern World?

In the modern world, terms like “soul,” “spirit,” and the “life of the mind” sound antiquated, and there is no longer any sense that there is anything to life beyond the pursuit of hedonic happiness and the accumulation of money, property, and other markers of worldly success...

Changing the World Through Guilt

Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels present a world teeming with people groping through guilt for a purpose they do not fully understand, often trading defiance for either despair or determination as the inescapable truth becomes clear: There is, on earth, no alleviation of the human condition... Today’s offering...

What Is Leisure For? John Paul II & Seneca Advise a College Student

The “purpose of free time,” paradoxical as it sounds, is more than a merely intellectual concern. The misuse of leisure is a living reality, one of great importance to those who suffer from it... What is the...

Awaiting the King: Developing a Christian Imagination

The church needs to ensure it is offering the true account of reality, rather than the account that the world is offering. That account, expressed through liturgy and worship, will form the Christian political imagination... Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology by James K.A....