The Second Commandment, that of not taking the Lord’s name in vain, is, like all the Ten Commandments, a summary of a deeper, tangled web of sinful thoughts, actions and tendencies which plague fallen humanity. For example, we all know…
Recently I decided to torture myself for my Lenten Penance by reading another “exposé” by Vice, which has fallen so far from what actual journalism they used to do almost a decade ago in regard to the Islamic State and…
Papal Funerals, for whatever reason, loom large in my memory of all things Catholic. I distinctly the death and funeral of Pope John Paul II, the novemdiales, the grief in the Churches, in Poland, in all the world. From the…
The recent and impressive advance of Ukranian forces through Russian lines, retaking a significant piece of their territory, has lately reawakened my Muses. The whole Russo-Ukranian War to me is tragic but also fascinating from a human management perspective. Many…
One of the surprising achievements of the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI was his masterful ability to address contemporary concerns with perennial wisdom, especially as found in Scripture and Tradition. Although he was not the first to address the issue,…
RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Saul Alinky, Rules for Radicals One of the torments of living in a culture that denies the concept of personal sin is having to grapple with the…
One of the occupational hazards of writing is that you can be reasonably certain that someone, somewhere, at some time has either had the thought you have had, or has come eerily close. Being a bit of a finance and…
So this has been something which I have wanted to do for a couple years, but I haven’t done till recently, because the summer allows for a certain amount of relaxation for me to indulge in more scholarly and human…
St. Irenaeus of Lyons has always been a favorite saint of mine since I had my first deep dive into the Fathers almost 20 years ago. He was suggested to me by a Catholic friend of mine after I was…
“Restoration” is a tricky word. If we are talking about a work of art, that typically involves the painstaking, patient and brutally slow work of removing layers of paint, pollution and other alterations which hide the original beauty of an…