As the legend goes — and it is only a legend — after Christ’s crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea carried the Holy Grail from Jerusalem to ancient Britannia, specifically, to the area near modern day Glastonbury. There, he founded an abbey and planted a thorn tree, one offshoot of which survives to this day. While in … Read more
It’s not often I take the time to recommend a book I haven’t written, but this one is too much fun for me to hold its authorship against it: Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries: Uncovering Mysterious Sights, Symbols, and Societies, by Stephen Klimczuk and Gerald Warner. I can see how the writers sold this deeply Catholic … Read more
So glorious, so mysterious, the Holy Grail symbolizes an elusive object of desire. Although now usually identified as the chalice of the Last Supper sought by Arthurian heroes, the Grail has been pictured as a dish, a ciborium, and even a white stone. Indeed, for a long time, its name had a rather mundane … Read more
In this Crisis Magazine classic, Mark Shea lays out the case for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. You may be surprised how strong it is. “Jesus came to give us moral guidance, and to prove he meant business, he let himself be killed and seen after death, so we would listen and be good.” Not … Read more
There’s big money to be made in undermining traditional Christianity. We saw it first in the phenomenal success of The Da Vinci Code, the film version of which will be in theaters later this month. You’re already no doubt familiar with the book’s unrelenting attack on the Church. And the movie looks to be no … Read more
“The Grail,” Langdon said, “is symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be “searching for the chalice” were speaking in … Read more
"Jesus came to give us moral guidance, and to prove he meant business, he let himself be killed and seen after death, so we would listen and be good." Not being raised in any particular religion myself, it wasn’t until later that I discovered that this view of Jesus’ death and resurrection (which I heard … Read more