Were ‘By their votes you shall know them’ the criterion of Catholic identity in Congress, many Catholics, and most Democrats among them, might never be known as Catholic. Where once the claim to private conscience sundered Christendom during the Reformation, today a concept of “personal choice” holds the allegiance of the vast majority of Catholics … Read more
Going ‘directly to the laity’ gains solid sales for new publisher of Catholic classics, old and new. One man’s passionate response to his belated discovery of the riches of Christian truth has taken shape in a tiny publishing house which is providing readers from ’round the world with beautiful new editions of classic Catholic books. … Read more
The central irony of our time is that a general confidence about what is the true meaning of life has diminished in direct proportion to our ever-greater certainty about the sheer facts of life. For example, suddenly the human community finds itself able actually to clone the individual human person. But in contrast to this … Read more
There is for the Christian no deeper desire, just as there is for us no fairer hope, than that one day—at last—each of us will meet Jesus. Something of what the ultimate experience will be has been hinted to sundry of the saints in their glimpses of the Beatific Vision, as to others have come … Read more
On a mountain in Tennessee there lives a man who claims to know Kristin Lavransdatter, and many there be who believe him. The man is Andrew Nelson Lytle, novelist, former professor of creative writing (whose students included Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey, and Madison Jones), and the sole surviving member of the most remarkable band of … Read more
Editor’s note: The following meditation by David A. Bovenizer on the consciousness unique to the modern era evokes a mood by way of complementing the adjoining excerpt from This Is My Body: An Evangelical Discovers the Real Presence, by Mark P. Shea. There once was a boy of 12 or so, who stood at sunset … Read more
Among bookmen, it is not wholly implausible that C.S. Lewis after his death could have appeared somehow to the cleric J.B. Phillips. There is, we know, a singular communion among authors and readers, even especially among readers with authors who have been dead for centuries. There really is, to paraphrase Chesterton, a “democracy of the … Read more