I dread the final season of The Chosen because that is when they will kill my dear friend Jesus. This may sound heretical, but I have never felt exactly this way about Him before. There has always been a kind of veil between Him and me, a fog that even His light cannot fully pierce. He is [...]

The chorus has grown louder over the past few years: Listen to the experts! Authoritative opinions carry epistemic weight; of that, there is little dispute. However, even on matters where an authority is an expert, there are times when things are better left unsaid. Take, for instance, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent interview on CBS’s Face [...]

It’s not hard to be depressed if you’re a conservative Catholic in 2021 America. That’s especially the case if, like me, you marvel at a country that seems to have radically changed in just a single generation. If a drag queen had shown up at my public elementary school in suburban Northern Virginia in the [...]

If Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is a thinly-veiled Puritan (see the earlier article in this series), so is Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Maria, in act two of Twelfth Night, describes Malvolio explicitly as “a kind of puritan,” and the critic Leslie Hotson has argued that Malvolio was modeled on the Puritan William Knollys, [...]

“Not many of you should become teachers. As you know, we teachers will be judged with greater strictness than others.” (James 3:1) What happens in our country’s college classrooms matters. It matters, of course, to the students themselves. It matters to their professors. And it matters, greatly, to the country, whose reins of leadership will [...]

In the recently-released book The Case for Patriarchy, Catholic writer and teacher Timothy J. Gordon boldly proclaims the “kingship of the social reign of Christ, King of the Patriarchy!” Gordon’s well-researched, deeply insightful work deconstructs feminism’s numerous nostrums that have upended modern life in the name of a false paradise of sexual egalitarianism.  Gordon traces [...]

Dystopian fiction can offer a curious consolation in dark times. There is comfort of a sort in the knowledge that our current troubles were foreseen by others: this shows, if nothing else, the evils of our age are not as chaotic as they sometimes seem. On the contrary, they conform to a pattern that can [...]

Conservatives long to recapture “the ideal of a gentleman.” But is this another example of cheap moralizing and lamenting the good days gone by? Do they themselves really understand what they aim to recover? Aaron Renn thinks not. In The Masculinist, he argues that today’s nostalgia for the gentleman ignores the historical context which made [...]

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is arguably the greatest play ever written. It is, however, also one of the most misread and misunderstood. One could write a book, or perhaps a whole shelf-full of books, on the way in which the play is misconstrued by critics, or the manner in which it is sacrificed to the latest literary [...]

“Pride goeth before a fall,” as the Good Book tells us. But prior to the fall, there is often a leap. The proud person believes he can do things that are far beyond his ability. Being ignorant, incompetent, or unqualified are not factors that deter him from attempting to do what he cannot do. A [...]

“People warn that you’ve got to watch what you say on the air,” said Tom Basile, “because of the cancel culture. I’m not going for any of that. I’m going to put God first.”  Basile, news anchor and host of the weekly show America Right Now at Newsmax TV, is a faithful Catholic and a [...]

The Wall Street Journal recently published a powerful article on the large and growing gap between the numbers of men and women enrolled in American colleges and universities. Enrollments have declined steeply in recent years, but they have declined much more among males than females. Only 40 percent of current college students are males. The [...]

Hot Take: the movie Hostiles, starring Christian Bale, is a love story.  One wouldn’t think this gritty, modern western would be a love story, given that it’s rife with suffering and violence. But it is precisely because of its real and raw depiction of lived human experience that it is a love story in the [...]

The biggest problem with critical thinking is the critical part. It’s not socially acceptable; it’s not nice to be critical. And thinking? Well, we’ll get to that.  As I was mindlessly dawdling on Facebook (which is about the only thing one can do there), and was just at the point of chastising myself, I came [...]

(Note: This previously unpublished article was written on September 14, 2001, from the office of Fr. John A. Perricone at St. Agnes Rectory in Manhattan, some two miles away from Ground Zero.  Much of the horror of that day has faded. Even more so, its urgent lessons. Much of America seems to have moved on [...]

More than most of Shakespeare’s plays, Julius Caesar begs a good many questions. Who are the heroes? Where are the out and out villains, the machiavels, who are so evident in many of Shakespeare’s other plays? Where are the women? Is their relative absence significant? What does it say about politics and politicians? What does [...]

Many baseball fans have been alarmed, if not disgusted, by recent news regarding Los Angeles Dodgers star pitcher Trevor Bauer, who is under investigation for allegations of sexual assault. According to the accuser, Bauer physically and sexually assaulted her on two separate occasions, including while she was unconscious. As troubling as such a story is [...]

That sport best pleases that doth least know how: Where zeal strives to content, and the contents Dies in the zeal of that which it presents: Their form confounded makes most form in mirth, When great things labouring perish in their birth. Love’s Labor’s Lost Strange to say (though not much stands outside that category [...]

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet of the Devil’s party without knowing it. — William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “Milton,” replied Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy, “though undeniably possessed of poetic [...]

For the child—and the adult who knows there is still a child in all of us—fairy tales reveal truths about ourselves and the world. As psychologist Bruno Bettelheim stated in his extraordinary study titled The Uses of Enchantment (1976), “the fantastical, sometimes cruel, but always deeply significant narrative strands of the classic fairy tales can aid in [...]