A sub-category of News.
It’s mud season in flyover country, so the broad-shouldered men from South Dakota farms dragged the bottoms of their boots against snow piles and kicked at a concrete riser before walking into a recent Catholic men’s retreat. It was a bad morning to leave the farm. The weather was a sunny 29 degrees, sweatshirt weather—a…
To guide my Lenten reflections this year, I am using the new book The Stations of the Cross in Slow Motion: A Daily Devotion by Suzan Sammons (Sophia Institute Press, 2023). This book guides the user each day through one Station of the Cross, considering several aspects of each for three to four days at…
What Nathaniel Lamansky suggests in his recent Crisis article, “Adopting a Medieval-Peasant Mindset,” is not new. Others have recommended this course of action before. Disconnect, unplug, log off Twitter, yank the data probe out of your headjack, just like Neo did in The Matrix. Go on an “internet detox”; turn off CNN (or ChurchMilitantTV), and…
Near the end of a long and fabled career, marked by a great deal of courage and no little success in the public sphere, Margaret Thatcher, who had been both the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century—from 1979 to 1990—and the very first woman to be Prime Minister, announced her retirement plans. “When…
Above: George Washington by Charles Wilson Peale (1776) February is certainly our most presidential month in these United States, featuring, as it does (in reverse chronological order) the birthdays of Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan. Moreover, this is 2024, yet another election year. Usually, the question of who will run on one side is settled, if…
Despite the celebratory headline in National Catholic Reporter proclaiming that “Pope Francis Has Changed the Mission for Catholic Colleges and Universities,” faithful Catholics should reject the misplaced triumphalism promoted by progressive professors that Catholic colleges should give up their primary mission to save souls. Pope Francis has not changed the evangelizing mission of Catholic… Source…
My generation first met the happy, hippie “Jesus” in our 1970s and ’80s CCD classes. He was a super-nice dude, not scary or stern or particularly demanding. This was a new, enlightened era, after all, and the old paradigms would no longer do. As I’ve often described of those vacuous catechetical times, “the God presented…
The Roman Station for this 1st Sunday of Lent is Rome’s Cathedral, the Basilic of St. John Lateran, referred to as the “Mother Church of the City and of the World”. It’s full title is the Papal Archbasilica Cathedral of the Most Holy Savior and of Saints John the Baptist and the Evangelist in the…
There are two opposite yet equally erroneous views about Christ that St. Ignatius of Antioch needs very directly to confront in his correspondence with the churches of Asia and Rome—that of Docetism and Judaism. Of the two, Docetism poses the more significant danger. In fact, in his Letter to the Smyrnaeans, which is the penultimate…
Western Civilization lives. I saw it peeking through the broken concrete three times last week; four times if you include orchestrated Beatles as Western Civilization, and I do, hey, hey, hey, and I do. First up was Canto Vocal, an international school of opera headquartered in Northern Virginia but with programs in Toulouse, France and…
