By the time you turn to this, gentle reader, your humble scribe will have Deo Volente, returned from sojourning in Asia Minor, the land of Mount Ararat, the birthplace of St. Paul, and the final home of the Virgin Mary, and the tomb of the apostle John. I intend to refrain from even the appearance … Read more
It is wearying to face current American culture every day. More than debating morals and policy, we are now virtually called to slay dragons—a heady business. But lately I also find myself weary at our way of meeting the challenge. The only way I can explain this feeling is that we are trying to do … Read more
Comparisons, as we have been taught, are often odious. Usually, when we start comparing ourselves with someone else, it is for one of two disreputable reasons. Either we feel hurt and want to convince ourselves that we are not inferior to someone we think unjustly favored; or, like Shakespeare, we begin envying this man’s art … Read more
Just when I think I have understood everything there is to understand about the Clintons and Clintonism, something happens that makes me realize what a strange and inexhaustible universe lies all around us. John Keats once compared his surprise on looking into a translation of Homer with the way “stout Cortez” [sic] must have felt … Read more
For some time, surveys of the American people gave reported that most of us believe that the country is headed “in the wrong direction.” What this phrase means has been a matter of heated dispute. Are we worried about economic uncertainties like downsizing and globalization; the unresponsiveness and corruption of our leaders, political parties, and … Read more
“If I find out that the Government is making it easier for my daughters to have sex without getting pregnant, I’m not going to call my Congressman, I’m going to get my shotgun,” a friend remarked a few years ago when the controversy over school-based “health” clinics (distributing condoms, contraceptives, and abortion information) first erupted. … Read more
Last year, a friendly foreigner asked me a particularly poignant question: “What are you Americans going to do about American culture? Every country has its moral problems, but you Americans are making the abnormal normal.” There was a certain irony in his remark. Himself a Brazilian, he prefaced his question with an admission that, between … Read more
“When a true genius is born, nothing in the family or its circumstances allows us to predict the new arrival. Something mysterious and sovereign suddenly erupts with genius. That’s all there is to say. Among this century’s Catholic geniuses, no clearer instance of this mystery exists than the brilliant French poet and essayist Charles Peguy. … Read more
And are two, and only two, respectable attitudes to the Christmas season. One is P.G. Wodehouse’s: “It was December, and another Christmas was at our throats.” (I quote, accurately I hope, from memory). Whether it is the forced fellowship of most Christmas parties or just a sign of my descent into curmudgeondom, each year I … Read more
November is a good tie—after Halloween, All Saints, All Souls, and with another presidential election staring us in the face—to think about death. Like many people, I first met death when relatives died, for me, my great-grandparents, whom I was lucky enough to know for a few years. In the late 1950s, people often still … Read more
Democratic politics challenge the soul. The whole process is one of the most profane spectacles imaginable. Not only do the worst human cravings for power and wealth, influence and fame, come immediately to the fore in our candidates during campaigns. They inevitably involve all the rest of us too in trying to identify where, amid … Read more
I am a bit surprised, and even a little embarrassed to admit it, but I learned something the other day from our sometime problem-child, elder-Catholic-statesman, Senator Edward Kennedy. Learned may be a slight exaggeration: Was reminded of? Realized once again? Had it more deeply brought home to me? Whatever the right subjective description, the objective … Read more
Summer always puts me in a special mood about God and nature. Especially for those of us in northern climes who endure winters largely indoors, summer seems like an expansion of the world and our place in it. In the sunshine and full foliage it’s easier to forget about the getting and spending, the political … Read more
The affirmative action regime of the past three decades will enter a crisis this presidential season. And not a moment too soon. Though the desire to treat blacks, women, and minorities fairly opened up American institutions and made us all more sensitive to injustices in some ways, it did so at a high price: the … Read more
It’s a sad fact of modern life that we think we have to wait for elaborate scientific studies to tell us it’s okay to believe what we already know. A small tidal wave of recent research, for example, has shown that if you want to help kids avoid drugs, pregnancy, crime, and the usual adolescent … Read more
The deepest problem in America’s culture war is that the Christians have grown ditzy about the theological virtue of charity. It’s bad enough when the new Visigoths (usually representing some government agency) ride in preaching a false compassion that denies the old law even as it imposes a harsh new one. But even most Catholics … Read more
In the current controversies over homosexuality and gay rights, much attention has been devoted to the example of ancient Greece. Most college students today do not study the classical world…
Dante’s great value for a modern reader lies in the sheer scope and clarity of his vision. Every spirituality worth a moment’s notice has recognized that the world beyond is larger and richer than this one. But this realization points to a danger: as our awareness of reality expands, our ability to imagine all that … Read more
When I am in Rome, I have two unbreakable drinking habits. Let me warn the Jansenist-inclined among this journal’s readers that one of these habits involves alcohol. In fairness to those practicing a more bibulous lifestyle, however, I should admit, before we go any further, that the other habit admits of nothing but pure water. … Read more
Last month I suggested that if the American bishops wanted a radically Catholic solution to inadequate health care services in this country, they might propose changes in the tax system that would encourage large contributions to the Church for health, education, and other matters of human welfare. Without constitutional debate, without careful reflection on and … Read more