Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishaq is 27 years old. She is eight months pregnant. Last week, she was sentenced to be beaten and then executed in the Sudan. Her crime is marriage: Ms. Ishaq married a Christian, which violates the law of her nation because it makes her a Muslim apostate. Mariam Ishaq has never been … Read more
Every year on the Feast of the Assumption, Catholics of native descent hold a powwow at Idaho’s oldest building, Sacred Heart Mission in Cataldo. For more than 150 years the Coeur d’Alenes have handed down the story of the Jesuit missionary who healed their chief’s daughter and brought the gospel to their people. This annual … Read more
This coming Sunday, May 25, Pope Francis is scheduled to meet the Eastern Orthodox Church’s Ecumenical Patriarch (EP) Bartholomew at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in order to commemorate the golden jubilee of the historic meeting between their respective predecessors, Paul VI and Athenagoras. According to the EP’s official website for the … Read more
I have always been a believer. Among other reasons, that’s because I think rationality demands it. When I talk about “belief” here, I mean it in a very broad sense, which is not synonymous with “Catholic” or even “Christian”; Sikhs, Hindus and Zoroastrians might all qualify, and I myself was raised in the LDS church … Read more
“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt 6:24). This Gospel passage provides us with proper framework to evaluate Christopher Dawson’s controversial essay, “Catholicism and the Bourgeois … Read more
Last month I discussed how the assumptions and language of public life today, which are based on commercial and bureaucratic concerns, are biased against Catholics. To make matters worse, the all-pervasive electronic media, increasing reliance on commerce and bureaucracy in everyday affairs, and changes in the purposes of formal education, along with its radical expansion, … Read more
Even one who is as maladroit as I when it comes to the Internet, profits from “YouTube” with its cavalcade of some of the great people and events of more than a century. Would that it could go back farther, but there are many moving scenes to which we have access. One shows Father Georges … Read more
There is just published a new biography: Charlie Chaplin by Peter Ackroyd. The publishers are marking the 125th anniversary of the comic’s birth. It is, however, the wrong anniversary. As 100 years ago this year, a 25 year old English music hall artist was asked to come to California to make a screen test. Soon … Read more
The world reeled in disbelief and grief. Sherlock Holmes was dead. But not for long. His resurrection—or resuscitation, to use a more practical term instead of such a mystical one out of reverence for the Master—his resuscitation brought with it a matchless struggle between logic and magic. Out of the tomb, a hero and a … Read more
For Catholics, sexuality does not start with sexuality. In a fallen world, it starts with the cross—and almost everyone harbors stereotypes when it comes to the cross. Some worry I’m about to get wildly conservative. Others are afraid I’ll be too liberal. Some would like it if I said we were going to find a … Read more
Father James Schall was, as many readers of this magazine know, a longtime professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University. For the last half-century, Fr. Schall has published a near-constant stream of books, articles, and reviews ranging over almost every subject, from Peanuts to Plato, sports to the Church Fathers. Although now retired, Fr. Schall … Read more
Book-tours can be risky affairs. There’s always the chance you’ll say something during your tenth radio interview of the day which you retrospectively wish you’d phrased differently. Then there’s the possibility you’ll play up to a live audience and make some truly imprudent comments. In a few short May days in New York, Cardinal Walter … Read more
Faith has always been a struggle for me. Indeed, throughout my forty-six years of life, very rarely have I ever felt comfortable for any stretch of time with my religion or my religious practices. I readily and rather gleefully abandoned almost any faith and religious observance during my teenage years. I’m not totally sure what … Read more
Homer’s great epic about the family as the center of civilization portrays two different types of woman: women who are pro-marriage and pro-family and women who are anti-marriage and anti-family. Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus who waited twenty years for her husband’s return from war and exile, defends her home from the suitors who … Read more
There is no way around it: the Christian’s life is to be one of obedience. “Let him who has ears to hear, hear,” says Jesus. That does not mean that we are beholden only to God, under our own understanding of who God is and what He wants from us. God in His mercy does … Read more
Distilling some of the ideas in my book on Thomistic angelology, I published a previous column in Crisis on the massive intelligence and powers of angels. The flip-side of these spiritual faculties, as Aquinas points out, is the existence of a dark kingdom, using the same intelligence and power to prevent the spread of God’s … Read more
The universal call to holiness is considered by many to be the most important development of the Second Vatican Council. The main location of this call is the fifth chapter of the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium: Thus it is evident to everyone, that all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank … Read more
The two upcoming synods of bishops on “The Pastoral Care of the Family in the Context of the New Evangelization” needs to discuss many serious topics other than communion for the divorced and remarried. I hope they revisit the standard recommendation that couples in invalid second “marriages” should “live as brother and sister.” This is … Read more
With Divine Providence, nothing is left to chance. On the Sunday of Divine Mercy, the Universal Church recognized what God had already ordained—solemnly declaring Pope John Paul II a saint. Almost twenty-four years earlier, this nascent saint made it possible for my future wife and I to meet in the Eternal City. It was to … Read more
When Muslims commit acts of terror, it is standard operating procedure for some authority or other to assure the populace that “this has nothing to do with Islam.” This is said so frequently as to induce a boy-who-cried-wolf reaction in anyone with an ounce of contrariness. Nowadays, if there’s a fender bender on the next … Read more