Catholics
-
The Communion of Saints
There are so many more like them. There’s Father Mario Falconi, an Italian priest who refused to leave Rwanda during the genocide and bravely saved 3,000 people from being massacred. There’s Father Mario Benedetti, a 72-year-old Italian priest based in Congo who fled with his congregation when their town was attacked by a brutal militia.
-
Modernity and Soul Atrophy
A couple of weeks ago, I linked to an interesting lecture/slide show by the late Leonard Shlain, a physician who has written a couple of interesting books about the interface between rationality and irrationality, science and art, literacy and orality. His book, the Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image and my
-
Bishop Tobin
Normally, I don't get into discussions about the church hierarchy because, sub specie aeternitatis, the hierarchy doesn't really matter that much. Its role is to keep the lights on and pay the bills, and to provide a minimal sense institutional continuity that humans need to function in groups over time. But whenever the people who
-
Republican Intellectuals
Look- the intellectual wing of the Republican party is dead. What is left are brain-dead acolytes spreading meaningless and simplistic anecdotes, trite stories, and distilled nonsense passed on that has a more fitting home in AM radio. The McCain campaign, once again, is just a symptom of the real problem- an intellectually incurious and lazy
-
Quote of the Day: James Carse
You know, my entire career was at New York University, but I only taught the history of Christianity once. That's when one of my colleagues was not available. So I went back to my graduate study of St. Thomas Aquinas. And I loved it so much. When we got to Thomas in the class, I
-
Profile(s) of an Obamacan (Updated)
David Brooks is wrong about Obama having been pushed to the far left. He will easily reoccupy the territory claimed by Hillary once she leaves the field. Former Republican John Cole exemplifies the attitude that will sway the sane people in the middle and middle-right toward Obama. He wants to send the far right extremists
-
Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary
If there is one overarching emotion that characterizes Romanticism, it's nostalgia. The Romantic hates modernity and longs for something lost, a lost age (or a lost childhood) when one did not feel so estranged, when men were men and women were women, where nobility and grace and chivalry were the rule, where the world was
-
Quote of the Day: Ralph Wood
Reviewing Alison Milbank’s Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real: The Catholic and analogical quality of Tolkien’s and Chesterton’s work is what Milbank most convincingly demonstrates. Unlike much modern art that revels in the macabre and the bizarre—self-referential, solipsistic, nihilistic—the fantastical work of these two Catholics is not such a sorry project.
-
Human Flourishing
Taylor makes an important distinction between what he calls older religions and the "higher" or post-Axial Religions. This term comes from what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, that period in the first millennium BCE when various higher forms of religion appeared seemingly independently in different civilizations, marked by such figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates,
-
Zombie Traditionalism
Ed: I'm reposting this piece from 2005 which newer readers may not have ever read because of its congruence with the last post about The Zeitgeist of Unbelief: To me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In the former people live