A sub-category of News.
On July 19, 2024, the world lost Wolfgang Smith, one of the most important yet underrecognized thinkers of our time. A rare polymath, Smith devoted his life to uniting the rigors of science with the depths of metaphysical and theological wisdom. In an age dominated by materialist reductionism and technological utopianism, Smith stood apart by…
I was recently made aware of an 8-year-old with an addiction to pornography. I will repeat that: an 8-year-old with an addiction to pornography. In fact, I will repeat it again because I worry that we have become so desensitized that this statement will not elicit the shock and horror that it should. Recently, I…
“This Mass is offered for….” How many times do Catholics hear that ritual phrase sometime before or at the start of Mass? It typically announces the intention for the Mass, usually for “the repose of the soul of….” The problem with ritual phrases is that they sometimes become white noise: routine enough to be expected…
In the past, I’ve written a good deal of criticism of the contemporary culture in which I live. I believe such criticism is not only warranted but important and necessary. At the same time, criticism and critique should never be an end point but, rather, a starting point. Let me indulge in one more critique:…
The conflict between nationalism and the Church at the outset of modernity came about because the Church believed society and human nature to be hierarchical. This belief clashed with the (relative) egalitarianism of nationalism. The Church saw society as a hierarchy of communities, from the family upward, with the Church at the top of this…
We’ve all seen the headlines about America becoming a majority non-Christian country someday. Though we are encouraged by recent waves of conversion, we all know people who have lost their faith. We read that “while most Catholics have remained within the religious fold, a significant number have left the Catholic faith: 15 percent of the…
During the month of June 2025, our family continued our journey into the Sacred Heart of our Lord and King. The Saturday after the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a group of twenty family friends gathered in our home chapel for the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart…
Not since Pascal compiled eight hundred or so fragments of religious insight into what would become his life’s work—a masterpiece of apologetics which he left unfinished at his death in 1670—has there been anything to match the sheer beauty and persuasiveness of the Pensées. Until, that is, G.K. Chesterton came along to give us Orthodoxy,…
I was never much of a conspiracy theorist. Sure, I heard the speculations (we didn’t land on the moon, vaccines cause autism, 9/11 was an inside job, etc.), but I usually just dismissed them with a shake of my head and maybe even a chuckle. I know that evil men can join together to do…
In the hushed, early morning hours, a small group of guerrilla fighters quietly set ablaze several small bridges north and south of the Colima railroad station, razing major access points in and out of the town strangled by criminal caudillos. Celebrating the destruction, Colonel Marcos “Marquitos” Torres Virgen (1899-1928) led his Cristero soldiers, filled with…
