The other day I was already thinking about gratitude when I started reading about old students and friends suffering from the continuing — the continuous — degeneration of the Episcopal church. Some of them faced losing their jobs, or had already lost them, but most of them suffered simply from seeing the communion they had … Read more
Matthew Lickona is a Catholic writer who understands the new media, as a visit to his classy Web site immediately attests. Already well-known for his book Swimming with Scapulars: True Confessions of a Young Catholic (Loyola Press, 2006), Lickona also understands the changing habits of younger readers, which is why he has published the first … Read more
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” That’s how divorce starts for the Catholic couples I talked to: hard-core, confession-going, Humanae Vitae-believing Catholic couples. Couples who know exactly what marriage is supposed to be. One man I spoke with, now divorced, took Scott Hahn’s Christian marriage class with his theology-major fiancée. Another couple, now divorced, … Read more
Father’s Day is almost upon us, and this time I really don’t want to blow it. Greg is a wonderful dad to our seven children. There has to be some present that expresses how much I appreciate him. Top gifts this year are the same as every other year: golf bags, fishing gear, and leather … Read more
Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney was born on May 8, 1786, three years before the world would collapse into the chaos of the French Revolution. His schooling did not start until he was nine. It lasted only three years. When Jean was eleven, an underground priest stopped at the Vianney family farm. When he asked Jean … Read more
In this Crisis Magazine classic, Todd M. Aglialoro says that golf isn’t just a game… it’s also a crash course in virtue. “Yes!” cried the young man fiercely, “Footling game! Blanked infernal fat-headed silly ass of a game! Nothing but a waste of time.” The Sage winced. “Don’t say that, my boy.”  P.G. Wodehouse … Read more
 In an interview published at National Review Online, Gian Maria Vian, editor of L’Osservatore Romano, responded to his critics. Vian makes it clear that he doesn’t have a high opinion of writers, like me, who have taken him to task for his treatment of President Barack Obama:  I think that if American Catholics … Read more
It’s interesting to be known as “the Catholic guy” at a public university in a predominantly Baptist town. I don’t think I fully understood the implications, however, until quite recently. It was February, and I was in Little Rock for the Southeastern Conference’s women’s basketball tournament. While I was out of town, some undergraduate student … Read more
Having come back from a two-week trek through Europe, I return this week to the subject of the virtues — this time, it’s Patience. Regular readers of mine might complain that here I’m preaching to the choir: Surely they of all people have mastered this virtue, if only by working their way through my labyrinthine … Read more
What do you get in this Crisis Magazine classic when you combine Peter Kreeft with a computer? A very entertaining meltdown. Â Â Make no mistake: I do not merely hate computers. I loathe, fear, despise, curse, and have constant torture and dismemberment fantasies about them. I know there are others out there like me, … Read more
“Whereto serves mercy, but to confront the visage of offence?” asks Portia in The Merchant of Venice. It’s a good question, and one that most of us don’t really think about these days. That’s because, increasingly, we are a culture that only has “mercy” on people who “couldn’t help it” or “didn’t know any better.” … Read more
In the last several years I’ve been invited to a few dozen colleges and churches around the country, usually to speak about Dante. It’s no surprise, I guess, that a translator of the Divine Comedy should receive such invitations. What is surprising, though, and what confounds the secularist who derives his news from Mother Times … Read more
 The other night, I put a question to some friends: “Why isn’t David Letterman funny anymore?” No one disagreed with the premise, but we struggled to find an explanation while trying to recall what made him funny in the first place. The question was provoked by Letterman’s sleazy “joke” about Governor Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old … Read more
It had been one of those days. Or weeks. Or months, maybe. Ten years ago, I had a husband who was working extra hours at his second job. I had a cranky, teething baby with an aversion to naps and an impending eye infection. I had a potty training two-year-old who was solely responsible for … Read more
Argentina entered a period of deep reflection following the recent death in old age of Raúl AlfonsÃn, the country’s first democratically elected president after the military dictatorship of 1976-1982. In three days of official mourning, Argentines waited hours in lines that stretched many city blocks to view the former president’s body. The government and opposition … Read more
 With a pro-abortion president in the White House, new sub-groups in the broader “culture of death” are coming into view. One of them is dark, indeed.  Take two recent events: Dr. George Tiller is compared to Martin Luther King, Jr. The president of Catholics for Choice attacks a political appointee, Alexia Kelley, who … Read more
During the persecution of Christians during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman prefect Rusticus was frustrated by the serene equanimity of the Christian convert Justin, a Platonic philosopher. The Romans considered Christianity a supserstitio parva (perverse superstition) and classified its morality as immodica (immoderate) for, among other things, refusing to abort the unborn … Read more
As I’m writing this column at the tail end of my first trip to Vienna, some of you who’ve read me before might expect a bittersweet love note to the Habsburgs — a tear-stained column that splutters about Blessed Karl and “good Kaiser Franz Josef,” calls this a “pilgrimage” like my 2008 trip to the … Read more
Don’t tell me about the world. Not today. It’s springtime and they’re knocking baseballs around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball. — Pete Hamill I once knew a woman who, when preparing the first fruit salad of summer, would lop … Read more
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Mt 5:6). Â The goods of this world, though they remain good, can be deceptive when you are a member of a fallen race. In certain moods of rude good health and the flush of adolescent insolence, it is all too … Read more
