I love ‘critical biographies’ of Saints. Hagiography as a literary genre tends to make facile and one-dimensional portraits of our Hallowed Heroes, but critical biographies put color, flesh and blood on the alabaster. One of my favorites is by Frederick…
Tacitus, (56-120 AD) the Great Latin Silver Age Historian and keen observer of human nature, never lacked for quips about politics and war, because it is in both those fields that the sublimity and depravity of human nature are on…
G.K. Chesterton once famously said that the mind is to truth what the mouth is to food. We need to close them around something solid, and nourishing. Today on Holy Thursday, the Church in most of the world is experiencing…
Words which reflect culture Some cultures have patterns of behavior or an outlook on life which is so distinct that they create words which at times are either extremely hard to translate, or words which reveal a deeper meaning in…
Last week, President Trump, in response to historic strain among American families and businesses, signed a $2,000,000,000,000 stimulus package. I felt it was important to write out those numbers, just to emphasize how massive this package truly is. Although admittedly…
A Lent to Remember Lent as a season has always been a sort of a “back to school” for Christ’s disciples. No matter whether you’re eight or eighty-eight, everyone is invited to reenter a sort of spiritual catechumenate, to seek…
With the coming of the global Covid-19 Pandemic, many dioceses have suspended Public Masses and are now beginning to dispense the faithful from the obligation to attend Sunday Mass. I am fearful that this is going to to cause a…
In September 2019, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) released the results of a survey conducted in the spring of the same year. The subject was sexual abuse in seminaries, and there were 15 questions which quite…
Although the Epiphany Octave has been abolished for over fifty years in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, it seems as if the Ordinary Form can hardly do without it; the Divine Office and other liturgical texts constantly point…
New Year, New Kanye People love conversion stories. This is a fact that transcends religion and culture. This is especially true when this involves some degree of vindication of the other side’s claims. Whether the claims are of ultimate metaphysical…