Art & Culture

The Royal Family in 1846

May 24, 2013

The Family Fell First then Faith Followed

The clearest example of the thesis on how family nurtures faith is in vocations. In the olden days larger intact families produced priests. That’s one reason the seminaries bulged back in the baby boom, also why there was something of…

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May 23, 2013

The New Meaning of “Cultural Competence”

by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg

The absurdity of the mantra “don’t judge” is lost on the ideologues. Ideology is the worship of an idea and as such it is the worship of self because in deciding what ideas to worship, the ideologue makes himself the…

May 20, 2013

Ignatius of Loyola: Lycurgus of the Jesuits

by Tom Riley

People who read the classical authors either love or hate Plutarch. I love him—and am in good company, since Shakespeare loved him, too. People who love Plutarch either love or hate his fondness for parallels between the Greeks and Romans. …

May 17, 2013

The Coming Christian Renaissance

The linear conception of history is so seductive, even antagonistic groups like Enlightenment philosophers and Marxists adopt it. It pervades their attitude toward religion. Both believe society matures as it sheds its religious heritage. Infantile societies practice religion, but progressive…

May 16, 2013

#RealityIsReality

by Scott P. Richert

On May 2, 2013, Rhode Island, the most Catholic of these United States, joined the rest of New England in declaring that the sky is green and the grass is blue—or, rather, that a man can marry a man, and…

May 14, 2013

Life and Good or Death and Evil?

by Arland K. Nichols

I recently read with great interest a fascinating story by the Associated Press. The life of a young girl, Lake Annabelle Hall, was saved following surgery to remove a cyst on her left lung. Had it not been discovered it…

May 13, 2013

What Commencement Addresses Reveal

The beginning of May is always an essential moment for our American culture, since we get a rather unique and picturesque glimpse into the status of our polity and its current health, or lack thereof. Moreover, this particular occasion in…

May 10, 2013

How the West Really Lost God

A few weeks ago Mitt Romney spoke at a college commencement exercise and encouraged the graduates to marry early and have a lot of children. He used the words “quiver full” taken from the Old Testament. The comment was unremarkable,…

May 8, 2013

Unlearning the Errors of Our Secular Age

I pointed out a month or two ago that the kind of meritocracy we have makes people stupid, mostly because it’s based on a technological attitude toward human life. Thought has an order, but not one we can fully grasp,…

May 3, 2013

Life, Like Baseball, Demands Order

by Donald DeMarco

Baseball, it should never be forgotten, is a game. But it is not just a game. Because of the way it employs life and death metaphors, its analogy with human drama is compelling if not totally convincing. A runner may…

May 2, 2013

Homosexuality & Diabetes: An Unspoken Likeness

by Joseph Schaeffer

As someone who tries to live a healthy, organic lifestyle, I have noticed more and more that in our culture today one is allowed to say things about people’s eating and fitness habits that you would never get away with…

May 1, 2013

Woe to Those Who Call Trash Treasure and Treasure Trash!

by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg

Ah, to know the mind of Aristotle, the man whom Dante called “the teacher of those who know.” How magnificent to commune with the intellect of Plato, of whom Alfred North Whitehead dared to say: “the European philosophical tradition consists…

April 30, 2013

The Primitive Cruelty of Modern “Love”

by Anthony Esolen

Several weeks ago, Saint Valentine’s Day at my school came and went. There was no dance. There was no concert. There was no ice cream social. There was no party for trading little gifts. There was no showing of She…

April 26, 2013

The Moral Life Takes a Holiday

by Regis Martin

When New Jersey-born novelist Philip Roth, arguably America’s most acclaimed author, turned eighty last month, his home town of Newark rolled out the red carpet, determined to honor a local luminary whose fame had reached into every corner of American…

April 24, 2013

A Nation of Sludge

by Anthony Esolen

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee; And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And…

April 19, 2013

Faith and False Prophets

by Howard Kainz

A rational person, in view of the innumerable contradictions emerging from religious spokesmen, will conclude that false prophets indisputably exist. And one wonders: if one’s personal encounters are primarily with such false prophets, can faith still be activated, and operate…

April 17, 2013

The Empress Is Naked

by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg

The matronly administrator instructed 1000 students through a microphone in her thick accent “you better clap boys and girls; you could be up there some day.” A tepid round of applause reverberated in the amphitheater for the ninety-seventh time at…

April 12, 2013

A Roller Coaster Ride Through the Catechism

by Rev. Dwight Longenecker

I fear that John Zmirak’s The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Catechism will be a failure. This is not because the book is bad, but because it is too good. Too good, for the dull religious reader. The problem is…

April 10, 2013

The Return of Eugenics

by William M. Briggs

It’s beginning to look a lot like 1913, a decade before the peak of the Social Darwinism movement, a time when educated and concerned people joined the Race Betterment Foundation and looked to the settled science of eugenics to save…

April 8, 2013

The Christian Boxer

by Rev. George W. Rutler

When our Lord says turn the other cheek, He speaks of a spiritual strategy to humble the self and then perhaps, to win other souls to Him. Not all the proud are shamed by humility and it seems pretty clear…

April 3, 2013

No King But Cesar

by Rachel Lu

It was one of those modern moments that would be impossible to parody. On Easter Sunday, visitors to Google’s main site were greeted with a unique doodle portraying a solemn-faced figure. Robed all in white and gazing meditatively towards the…

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