Katharine, my preteen, sent me a link to a song she’d happened across. “It’s my new jam,” she wrote, and I eagerly clicked on it to listen. What dad of a preteen wouldn’t? Imagine my surprise when Kath’s new jam turned out to be an ad for a cleaning product. The accompanying video was fun … Read more
Many believe that Christendom was a rigid and brutal order. In medieval times, we are told that tyranny ruled, and the Church and the nascent State were constant rivals in the pursuit of dominance. So many modern historians have cynically reduced this period when Christianity prevailed to a time of cultural darkness and violent power … Read more
Things look bad in the Church and Western world just now. The Church, humanly speaking, seems to be destroying herself through unresisted absorption in a secular world with which she has ever less in common. What was once her real, though imperfect, reflection—the civilization of the West—is also destroying itself through willful rejection of moral … Read more
Is civilization worth defending? Should we aim to conform to it so that we can be considered civilized? Should we aim to bring our children up according to its norms so that they can also be considered civilized? Should we try to make our country and our world as civilized as possible? The chances are … Read more
When Groucho Marx announced that he would never want to join a club that would have someone like him as a member, it obviously hadn’t crossed his mind that he had just made an excellent (if unwitting) case for membership in the Roman Catholic Church. A club where the admissions policy is so perfectly promiscuous … Read more
If you ask, it may be given. That is why you might hesitate to pray for courage. Or so went the reasoning of a friend who noticed that when she prayed for courage she not only received it, but was immediately projected into circumstances in which it would be tried. Well, she lived to joke … Read more