Caught by Contagion
You are the company you keep. And here, the more agreeable you are, the more susceptible you are to the infection.
Why the Church Has Failed to Convert Modern Man
A couple of months ago I noted that we live in a time in which connections like family, kinship, religion, and inherited culture and community are dissolving. The feeling against borders and Brexit shows that even national connections are disappearing in the minds of many people. But a time of dissolution is also a time … Read more
Coming Out of the Closet
It was the late 1990s, and I went up to Rolling Stone on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan to say hello to my old friend Bobby Love who was the longtime managing editor. I had worked at Rolling Stone for a short while many years before and had made many friends and drinking buddies, including Bobby … Read more
The Human Gated Community
They have become ubiquitous: communities of the living that can be entered only by passing a guard house or punching some numbers into an electronic pad. They are brazenly distinct from the rest of the world where communities grow organically and one can pass freely into a neighborhood or onto a street without challenge. Punching in … Read more
What Explains the Growth of Fake News?
Recently, within just a couple days of each other, we saw two particularly egregious cases of mainstream media journalists and commentators frenetically trumpeting dubious news stories that were quickly debunked. The first was the anonymously sourced story from Buzzfeed News claiming that hard evidence exists of Donald Trump directing his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie … Read more
Why Priests Won’t Protest Violations of Clerical Celibacy
Author’s note: The following essay is inspired by the testimonies of my brother priests along with elements of my own experience. It is not a testimonial nor does it reflect my current experience of seminary or priestly life at Sacred Heart Major Seminary where I currently study nor the local Churches where I serve. I … Read more
The Illusion of Independent Thinking
In John G. West’s book of a decade ago, Darwin Day in America, in which he sketches the influence of Darwinian-inspired materialist thinking on a range of subjects, he has a striking chapter showing how all too many academics, teachers, and their supporters in the media tolerate no questioning about any part of evolutionary theory—even … Read more
For the Restoration of Reason and Reality
We live in times of radical change, so if we want to understand what’s going on why not start with the sayings of revolutionaries? In the most basic of modern revolutionary texts, the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels tell us that in modern industrial society “all that is solid melts into air, all that … Read more
Academia, Mental Conformity, and Evil
St. Louis University, a Roman Catholic institution of “higher learning,” capitulated to student and faculty demands to remove a nineteenth century statue from campus. The statue, which commemorates the missionary efforts of Jesuit priest, Pierre-Jean De Smet, depicts the latter on an elevated platform holding a cross over the heads of two American Indians. The school … Read more
On Not Taking It Anymore
“Do not conform yourselves to this age.” ∼ St. Paul, Letter to the Romans (12:2) Living in a world where much has been laid waste by forces hostile to faith and hope, the challenge becomes that of finding evidence for the things that one loves. Or simply going mad in the face of all … Read more