“As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man; they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage up to the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all,” says Our Lord. “Similarly, as it was in [...]

The death of a father is an earth-shattering event. When my father died in 1993, I felt disoriented. I had never been in a world that did not include him. I could feel myself move up the generational ladder. No one is above me any longer. No one who matters stands above me. When I [...]

In the chilling conclusion to M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 superhero thriller, Unbreakable, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) realizes with much horror and disgust that Elijah Price, a.k.a. Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), has orchestrated numerous terrorist acts (train wrecks, plane crashes, ocean liners sinking, etc.) in order to find David, who has the special powers of [...]

Last week, a good and holy priest went to his eternal reward after a long and distinguished life as a teacher and writer. Father James V. Schall, S.J., died of pneumonia at the age of 91 in the company of family on April 17, 2019. A few months earlier he had been hospitalized much to [...]

Midafternoon last Wednesday, on the eve of the Paschal Triduum, I got word that Fr. James Vincent Schall, S.J., had died. The news did not come as a complete surprise; a few days earlier I heard that he was going to be moved from a hospital in Los Gatos, California, to a hospice. My first [...]

"Nothing is more disconcerting, it seems to me, than to enter a home or apartment in which there are no books and no place for books, no sign a book had ever been there. It always seems like a kind of desecration to me, even though I am perfectly aware that bookless people can also [...]

Amidst the divisions and frustrations that mark the Church of our time, there are, quietly dispersed throughout the Mystical Body, clergy and laymen striving for the recovery and promotion of the Apostolic Faith. Their good work—and the renaissance it will bring about—is easily obscured, as it is rarely offered a proper place in the tired [...]

Just over a century ago, Albert Einstein rolled out his theory of General Relativity, a paradigm-shifting take on the nature of gravity and its relation to space and matter. Of the implications of his theory, one that has captivated the imagination of filmmakers and the scientistic hopes of researchers and laypersons alike, is the black [...]

Discussing St. Thomas Aquinas’s love of teaching, Josef Pieper writes: Teaching does not consist in a man’s making public talks on the results of his meditations, even if he does so ex cathedra before a large audience. Teaching in the real sense takes place only when the hearer is reached—not by dint of some personal [...]

I am part of a small circle of acquaintances of yesteryear—all 1968 alumni of the same college—who share stories, anecdotes, quotations, book recommendations, and video clips. Recently, we were treated to this declaration, attributed (without citation) to Thomas Jefferson: “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from [...]

“The noble person concerns himself with the root; when the root is established, the Way is born.”  ∼ Confucius, Analects 1.2 Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option has run the critical gauntlet for the past two years, earning praise, critique, and cautious assessment from both the Christian and secular press. While there is much that is [...]

News is that Providence College, where I taught for 27 years, will be getting a new president in 2020. He won’t have troubles with money or buildings, whereas for re-establishing the Catholic faith as the school’s foundation, aim, and reason for existence, he will face, outside of the theology department, a nearly universal hostility from a [...]

We live in a time of dissolution. Many people find it hard to take such claims seriously because people have always complained about the degeneracy of the times. And in any event, life involves change, which means the old disappears to make way for the new. So a time of new life would also be [...]

On a Sunday evening in the mid-1990s, some friends and I had gathered for coffee after Mass at the Newman Center and the conversation turned to what was then the latest technological advance into our daily lives: e-mail. Alone among my peers, I did not welcome e-mail. I believed it signaled the death of a [...]

From days of old, mankind has wrestled with the question of ethics. In ancient Israel, after fifty years of Babylonian captivity had all but erased God’s providence and law from memory, the Jewish community wondered aloud: “How now shall we live?” The very question presupposes a standard and a purpose. Even the early Greeks, influenced [...]

They have become ubiquitous: communities of the living that can be entered only by passing a guard house or punching some numbers into an electronic pad. They are brazenly distinct from the rest of the world where communities grow organically and one can pass freely into a neighborhood or onto a street without challenge. Punching in [...]

“Beam me up Scotty.” These are an abortionist’s words directing a nurse to turn on the suction machine, words Abby Johnson heard when she was unexpectedly summoned to the procedure room of the Bryan, Texas, Planned Parenthood clinic, of which she was the manager, to assist in an ultrasound-guided abortion. She was stunned to observe [...]

There is no rest where you seek it. Seek what you seek but it is not where you seek it.  ∼ St. Augustine New York Post op-ed editor, Sohrab Ahmari, was twelve years old when he proclaimed himself an atheist. Angry about various things in his life, and alienated by the re-Islamization of his native Iran, [...]

As Christopher Dawson attempted to discover the sources of the ideological disruptions of the twentieth century as well as solutions to the death and terror they caused, he often produced some of his most impassioned work. Indeed, he often comes across, for lack of a better way of putting it, as inspired, a prophet, ready [...]

Last week, Jordan Peterson, who is currently the world’s top public intellectual, had his fellowship offer to the University of Cambridge revoked. On March 20, Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity issued the following statement on Twitter: “Jordan Peterson requested a visiting fellowship at the Faculty of Divinity, and an initial offer has been rescinded after a [...]