Great Little One! Whose all-embracing birth Lifts Earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to Earth. — Richard Crashaw These last days of December have suddenly come upon us, leaving in their wake the wonder of a God who without loss of divinity dared to assume the burden of a broken and fallen humanity. Moved by an incomprehensible … Read more
I picture him as a tall Texan, his outsize appearance easily eclipsing everything in sight, save only the immense shrine that he and a busload of tourists have come to Rome to see. And then, throwing up his hand at the end of an exhausting exploration of the world’s most beautiful basilica, I hear him … Read more
Among the many symptoms marking the crisis of faith and culture we are going through, here’s one that happens every year after Thanksgiving, falling like dead leaves during the days before Christmas, a feast for which there is simply no way to give adequate thanks. And that is the season of Advent, which finds itself … Read more
An old and valued friend, who retired after a half-century cheerfully and productively spent in the classroom, used to tell me that it was silly to think anyone would remember him once he was gone. “Like a stone falling into a river,” he’d say, using one of several similes to which he was drawn, “I’ll … Read more
On the day C.S. Lewis died—November 22, 1963—the world was hardly in a position to take notice. The assassination of an American President, after all, had clearly and shockingly co-opted everything that day, including even the ending of a life unsurpassed for its sheer breath catching lucidity in defense of ordinary Christian belief. But history, … Read more
I once knew a pastor whose homilies were so awful, so bone crushingly boring, that I’d swear he composed them in the time it took us to sit down after he’d finished reading the Gospel. In other words, three seconds flat. But while they may have been a tad bit thin theologically, they were always … Read more
It was sixty years ago that the Hungarian émigré historian, John Lukacs, published his first book, The Great Powers and Eastern Europe, a masterful treatment of the subject, whose conclusion, including an elegy on the lost world he left behind, has haunted me for years. Surveying the wreckage of that shattered and divided world, he … Read more
In thinking about the destiny of those who die, the course of their final trajectory beyond the grave, it is always unwise to make predictions about the precise place awaiting them on the other side. How can anyone, in the absence of a sudden sunburst from above, possibly know? Unless one were fully omniscient—which is … Read more
When asked once about a sermon he’d just heard, the legendarily laconic Calvin Coolidge managed to summarize its theme in a single word: “Sin.” Pressed for details concerning the preacher’s views on the subject, President Coolidge added four more: “He was against it.” Where Coolidge himself stood on the matter, the record does not show. … Read more
There are fewer than ten years separating the ages of my wife and me, a difference hardly worth mentioning in a marriage of more than thirty years. Yet the distance between the two worlds we grew up in, the forces that shaped the cultural and religious horizons of our two lives, remains so vastly different … Read more
“There’s little point in writing if you can’t annoy somebody.” So wrote the late Kingsley Amis, one of the grand old curmudgeons of English letters who, over a long and highly combative literary career, managed to annoy just about everybody. And while I do not aspire to the same heights of abrasiveness achieved by … Read more
At a splashy social event this past summer, at which only a few folks did I actually know, I found myself seated next to a middle aged woman, whose quiet reticence stood in marked contrast to the noise and bellicosity that now and again take hold of me. And she said something so shocking that … Read more
There are many profound and beautiful things to mark the reader’s passage through Lumen Fidei, the long awaited encyclical on faith by Pope Francis, issued on June 29, the Solemnity of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul. Beginning, of course, with the recognition that the lion’s share of the work derives from his learned and … Read more
The trouble with atheists, some wag once wrote, is that they are always talking about God. How endlessly they obsess about him! And what strikes one straightaway about the sheer mind-numbing attention they pay to God, including especially the problems posed by us benighted folk who persist in believing in him, is that it so … Read more
In his fantastical account of “The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green,” G.K. Chesterton invites us to imagine an astronomer regaling his audience in great and gorgeous detail about a strange new planet he’s just discovered. Only gradually do we realize that this utterly amazing place is in fact our very own world, replete with wonders … Read more
If ever you find yourself about to be eaten by an alligator, or sat upon by a hippopotamus, it is probably not a good idea to appeal to the better angels of their nature in hopes of securing your release. In the first place, there are no better angels lurking about the animal world, nature … Read more
A couple of months back, I received a phone call from one of my sisters, reminding me of a wedding reception that she and everyone else in the family would be flying down to Florida to attend. A nephew had just gotten married in New York, and everyone was eager to celebrate the union. Was … Read more
Not since the impacted savageries of the late 8th century, when Viking raiding parties ravaged the coast of England, can anything compare to the protracted destruction wrought by the German Air Force during the Battle of Britain. Between September of 1940 and May of 1941, countless incendiary bombs fell upon that brave island race. A … Read more
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavor end? — Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. If success in this world, never mind the numerous and noisy proponents of the health and wealth gospel, … Read more
“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” So begins one of the finest novels written in English in the last century, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. It is not, however, the saddest story ever told. That distinction belongs to a tale told in Aramaic back in the first century, which was … Read more