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Above: photograph of a woman holding a baby and doing laundry, c. 1919. National archives. The following reflection is for my sisters in Christ called to the married state. The magnanimous man in Aristotle’s Ethics is the man who “deems himself worthy of great things and is worthy of them.”[1] In other words, he knows…
The Florida Mall stands as a glowing symbol of all that American culture has become—glowing not with the golden hue of man’s greatest achievement but, rather, with radioactive decay. I’ve been in malls before, of course, but somehow, wading through the sea of people, lights, signs, and sounds, the tableaux of top American brands coaxing…
Like many Americans, my heart swelled with pride as I watched the astronauts land safely in the Gulf of America. The SpaceX rescue of the stranded astronauts ended wonderfully, but it also highlighted an important lesson: why a relatively small company was able to succeed where a governmental bureaucracy (NASA) and its go-to military-industrial-complex contractor…
Welcome to the second part of Lent. As Pius Parsch puts it in The Church’s Year of Grace, in the first two weeks we put ourselves on guard against attacks by the Prince of this world, the Devil and fallen angels, with the weapon of mortifications. On this Sunday we move from defense against the…
In October of every year, my diocese, the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, conducts a “head count” in order to determine average Mass attendance. The results of the 2024 count were published in the diocesan newspaper, The Arlington Catholic Herald, in the Jan. 30 – Feb. 12, 2025 edition. Out of an estimated 433,000 registered Catholics…
Over the centuries, the English have been something of a curse to the Irish. English rulers, such as Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Oliver Cromwell, have sought to impose their will on the people of Ireland, often through the tyrannical use of terror on a defenseless population. There is, however, one sense in which the…
Above: Castle Hill, New Zealand Led by Gandalf and the famous leader of the dwarves, Thorin Oakenshield, the council held in the little house of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins led those present to one of the most challenging decisions ever made in the world of stories: to set out to confront Smaug, the dragon who…
Editor’s note: this article is occasioned by the recent critique of the Trad movement we published by Fr. Michael Brownson. I have already conceded Fr. Brownson’s primary criticism, as I understand it, using the term “Neo-Jansenism” in this article on the Dubia of Vatican One. I have further responded to Fr. Brownson here and he…
Since before I can remember, I have been obsessed with sports. As a youngster, I did what virtually every Canadian kid does: I played hockey and dreamt of playing in the NHL. That didn’t pan out, but I eventually fell in love with football and rugby. I was what you call a “husky” kid; you…
Zeynep Tufekci is a Princeton professor who writes regular op-eds for The New York Times. Her March 16 column, “We Were Badly Misled by the Event That Changed Our Lives,” generated no small amount of pushback. That was somewhat surprising, considering that just three years ago Tufekci was still being lionized as “consistently ahead of…
