Years ago when our children were young and bursting with that innocence of wonder that I pray will never entirely leave them, I was asked when I thought God would open the clouds and come down. “How should I know?” I’d answer. “I’m only a theologian. Go ask your mother.” Evidently they did, since I … Read more
The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations. ~ G.K. Chesterton Two of my former students are on the road to becoming Catholic, and both recently confided in me their frustration regarding Holy Communion—but it’s not the reason you’d expect. You’d think they’d be struggling with … Read more
Advent and Christmas celebrate the joy of a new life. Like an expectant mother, we wait, with bated breath, joyful anticipation and we brim over with excitement. For God is with us, He is soon to be born, Come, Come, Emmanuel! The Visitation of Mary is a joyful visit between cousins but also an encounter … Read more
Among the many symptoms marking the crisis of faith and culture we are going through, here’s one that happens every year after Thanksgiving, falling like dead leaves during the days before Christmas, a feast for which there is simply no way to give adequate thanks. And that is the season of Advent, which finds itself … Read more
Another December, another War on Christmas. Every Advent, it seems, we must slog through a barrage of anti-Christmas noise commandeered by the usual suspects. Full of sound and fury, they engage in a grotesque and painful pirouette with spineless officials and misguided judges to cleanse any remaining whiff of religion from public life. The all-too … Read more
It is ironic that the scintillating Graeco-Syrian Saint Luke was martyred, according to tradition in Boeotia, a humid and swampy part of central Greece whose people were said to be not interested in philosophy or much of anything beyond their uneventful daily lives. That may have been the propaganda of the superior Athenians, who caricatured … Read more
The star that Jean-Paul Sartre once was, doyen of his day’s incompletely educated intellectuals, has not quietly faded the way splashy names often do in the generation after they die. His star has astonishingly imploded. Some echoes remain, for he was not devoid of a way with words, nor was he without rays of light … Read more
Ignorance and Want: “…no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade… has monsters half so horrible and dread.” Leave it to Mr. Dickens to capture the demons of fallen nature and fallen society without taming them. This is a single instance in a multitude why A Christmas Carol is no Hallmark affair to be … Read more