As we enter Holy Week, it is good to focus our minds on the matter that occupied Jesus in His final hours before His Passion, that we might imitate the mind of Christ. Therefore, I thought we might take a little time and look at what is called the Last Supper Discourse in the Gospel … Read more
Barack Obama is a politician who likes to follow through on long-term strategies and avoid making course corrections. That’s how he believes he won in 2008, and since then he’s shown that he’s not much into details. So he was happy to let congressional appropriators fill in the blanks in the 2009 stimulus package, and … Read more
The Libyan affair — one does not know what to call it; not a war precisely, more an “experimental bombing” — is one in which both Canada and the United States are participating. We have a general election going on up here in the Great White North (where it is still snowing as I write, … Read more
As a tenured professor at a state school with a conventional pension plan, I have been very interested in the recent labor unrest in Wisconsin. Throw in the facts that my grandfather was a local politician in Wisconsin and that I have a first cousin in that state who is an elementary teacher, and the … Read more
The defining characteristic of all my best teachers, from elementary school onward, can be summed up in one word: humility. I used to harbor the misconception that humility meant thinking less of yourself, but the ideal is much more honest. It is thinking of yourself exactly as you are — no more and no less … Read more
Dr. Habib Malik of the Lebanese American University has been a friend for many years. Few men have such an informed and humane view of the sad, even desperate, position of Christians in the Middle East. As a Lebanese Maronite with a Harvard doctorate in intellectual history, what Dr. Malik knows comes from experience as well … Read more
The ugly little secret of life, one I hesitate to share with students, is how disappointing all of it is. Indeed, if the reader is under 30, I’m tempted to tell him to click on some other column — lest I drain from him the sparks of life and energy that are meant to keep … Read more
Pat Archbold gets it. And, despite the remarks of a few remaining suckers in his comboxes, most of his readers get it, too. As many people were sickeningly sure would happen, the pro-life cause was betrayed yet again by the Stupid Evil Party, and pro-lifers were, once again, instructed by the Party to talk about the … Read more
In mid-April, the Polish government in exile requested that the International Red Cross investigate the failure of the Soviet government to explain the fate of 8,300 Polish officers “taken prisoner” by the Red Army in the autumn of 1939. The Germans had just announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. … Read more
The hermitage isn’t what you’d expect: a small home in a quiet neighborhood of Essex, Maryland, that was originally built as a one-room fishing shack 100 years ago. But then, the hermit who lives there isn’t what you’d expect, either. Mary Zimmerer, now Sr. Maria Veronica of the Holy Face, is a bubbly widow who … Read more
The day my mother joined Facebook, I updated my status to read: “That loud crashing sound you just heard? That was worlds . . . colliding.” Imagine the noise, then, when my 16-year-old daughter created her page last month. Kateri is a responsible young lady, and yet still I felt the need to set some ground … Read more
Boys, before we get down to particulars, I want you to know why we have altar servers at all. Do the deacons and I need you to bring the bread and the water and wine to the altar? No, we could do that ourselves. Do we need you to carry candles and the cross and … Read more
Recently I had a short contretemps with someone who said that her teenage son had come to a wonderful and intelligent conclusion about Homer’s Odyssey. He said that, when you stripped the beautiful language away, what you had left would make a good R-rated quest video game. She agreed with that assessment and grew angry when … Read more
This laconic statement in Psalm 36 does not, of course, express a choice of the psalmist. It is the realistic observation of a man lucky to have lived long enough to make it. We are the age we are whether we like it or not, but there are good and bad ways of accepting it. … Read more
When we are spiritually weak, God often uses gentle means to draw us to Himself — aware that anything harsher would drive us off. This is one of the most attractive aspects of our divine romancer: that He woos as a true lover would, and protects like a firm, loving parent. Complications arise when we’re … Read more
Texas Rep. Ron Paul will decide this month whether or not he’ll run for president in 2012. According to the Alex Jones Show, he will probably join the South Carolina debate between potential presidential contenders without necessarily making a commitment to run for president. Former governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura recently said he would “join … Read more
While Hispanic immigrants to America may be helping to keep the number of Catholics in the U.S. afloat, one sociologist says that the number of Catholics in Mexico is actually dwindling: More than 1,000 Mexicans left the Catholic Church every day over the last decade, adding up to some 4 million fallen-away Catholics between 2000 … Read more
In the fall of 2007, I spent a week in Spain, giving lectures, meeting with Spanish Catholic leaders, and making a hair-raising climb up several hundred scaffolding stairs to the top of Antoni Gaudi’s Basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona — preceded by Stanislaw Cardinal Dziwisz, Pope John Paul II’s longtime secretary, who was … Read more
My father and mother, ages 88 and 86, recently entered the Catholic Church. Like most things in life, their entrance could never have been imagined or expected, even ten years ago. Yet, like all things in life, their conversion was providential, and, when it happened, it seemed utterly natural. How natural it is, that with … Read more
The Guardian‘s George Monbiot is distressed at the lack of scientific evidence provided by the anti-nuclear movement — spearheaded by Dr. Helen Caldicott, the world’s leading anti-nuclear campaigner — to back their positions: The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims … Read more