Are modern smartphones and algorithms destroying our capacity for deep thought? In this video essay, Dr. Ryan Topping breaks down the science of attention, addresses 3 myths of the digital mind, and provides 4 practical, tactical skills to master hard books and rebuild your focus.
In her biography of G.K. Chesterton published in 1943, Maisie Ward tells of this remarkable trait of the great convert and Catholic apologist: “(He) liked everybody very much, and everything very much. He liked even the things most of us dislike. He liked to get wet. He liked to be tired. After…[a particular period of]… Read More G. K. Chesterton and The Eternal Thank You
+ John Paul II on the most decisive confrontation and “history’s last lap.” Karol Wojtyla (St.JPII) wrote, “A non-Catholic philosopher once said to me: ‘You know, I just can’t stop myself reading and rereading and thinking over the first three chapters of Genesis.’ And indeed it seems to me that unless one does so reflect… Read More Popes St. John Paul II and St. Pius X on the AntiWord
Hard Sayings. “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience [in suffering in Him] and comfort of the scriptures might have hope” of redemption. — Romans 15:4 John 15 18 “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. 19 If you were of the… Read More More Terrible Times to Come for Many Christian Families.
Is Zohran Mamdani the tip of the spear we’ve seen too often in history? Rori Stewart and Alastair Campbell gush for the Socialist (see below). Of course they would. Who are his big money backers? Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it… Read More The Lessons of Mao’s Cultural Revolution
“One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved? In… Read More One Word of Truth. Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The Last Waltz – The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down: Levon Helm leads The Band through a passionate take of the Civil War-inspired song, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”.
Anti-Catholicism Today. The Tuam Dead Babies and Magdalene Laundries Whoppers. Brendan O’Neill,EditorSpiked Online. And more. For proof of the maxim that ‘A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on’, look no further than the Tuam 800 dead babies story. Courtesy of a modern media that seems more interested in titillating readers… Read More The Dead Babies and Cruel Nuns Whoppers
‘The desert in the city’, I repeated over and over to myself, looking out of the window, my thoughts reaching to the distant origin of this word ‘desert’ which had been laid on my heart at the best moment of my life. I thought back to nights in the Sahara, to the sand-dunes, to all… Read More The Desert in the City. Carlo Carretto.
+ If any one says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. —1 Jn 4:20 Admitting when we’ve done something wrong can be difficult. Dec 10, 2023 5:07 PM EST By Morgan… Read More Why Some People Just Can’t or Won’t Apologize
Simple acts of charity can leave a lasting impact on both the giver and the recipient. Furthermore, they highlight the human connections that charity fosters, strengthening relationships within communities. By understanding personal accounts of charity, readers can develop a deeper appreciation for altruism and its role in enhancing personal and collective well-being. —Blissful balance Generosity… Read More Simple Acts of Charity
“What earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden and even considered harmful.” —Pope Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the occasion of the publication of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, July 7, 2007. “The Holy… Read More The Sacred Deposit of the Faith. No Substantial Evolution of Meaning.
Archbishop (Blessed) Fulton J. Sheen
Only illness at home could make me late posting this. Raymond Arroyo is joined by Fr. Gerald Murray, priest of the Archdiocese of New York, and Robert Royal, editor-in-chief of TheCatholicThing.org, for a very special edition of The World Over from St. Louis, Missouri on the occasion of the Beatification of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.… Read More A Blessed Day for the Church!
Preaching to the infirmed, disabled and those who care for them at one of Catholicism’s most iconic shrines, Pope Leo XIV said that “no human law should ever make you lose the certainty of your dignity.” National Catholic Reporter Pope Leo XIV celebrates Sunday Mass at the field alongside the Sanctuary of Our Lady of… Read More From Lourdes, Pope Leo issues stark rejection of France’s assisted dying law
“Hegel is the ideological nexus where the Gnostic scientific dictatorships of Nazism and Communism intersect.” — Phillip and Paul Collins, The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship. “We must … worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on Earth” —Hegel Note: contrary to Hegel’s extreme secularist nationalism and ideology, the Church in modern times… Read More Hegel, the Idolatry of the State, and the Cunning of [his] ‘Reason’.
It is not without significance that Divine Mercy Sunday Follows Easter. For Mercy is the fruit of Easter. And Jesus came not to call the righteous but sinners into his kingdom (Luke 5:32). He came “to seek and to save that which was lost”. Mercy is the revelation of the very heart of God and the Good… Read More Nihilism and the Divine Pity
“The doctrine of the Faith which God has revealed is not proposed like a theory of philosophy to be elaborated by the human understanding, but as a divine deposit delivered to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly declared…. That sense of the sacred dogmas is to be faithfully kept which Holy Mother Church… Read More Not Proposed Like A Philosophical Theory
Understanding the Epistemological Foundations of Scientific Totalitarianism. by Phillip D. Collins. Scientific totalitarianism is certainly not a new topic in the halls of political science and history. Given its bloody legacy of democide (i.e., state-sanctioned genocide, mass murder, and politicide) and its prolific spread throughout the world, scientific totalitarianism remains a preoccupying sociopolitical phenomenon of… Read More The Faustian Face of Modern Science
Bad and evil ideas have been far more virulent in history than silver, gold, or geopolitical schemes. Our modern errors arose out of the weeds of bad Christian soil, fueled by concupiscence and backed by diverse and mighty powers. King Henry VIII’s ecclesial revolution in England, born in lust and ending in the vast dissolution of the… Read More Philosophers of the New Light
I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard or read of people blaming their personal troubles, failures or psychological stresses on “Catholic guilt” in the last 40+ years. It is as though the Church is the great rain cloud ever shadowing the grand Mardi Gras that so many expect life to be. All that… Read More Truth and “Catholic Guilt”
“Jack Kerouac was born Jean Louis Lebris de Kerouac in 1922 and grew up in the small working-class town of Lowell, Massachusetts. His ancestors were French-Canadians, and in his later years his genealogy would become very important to him, as the many references to it in his writings and interviews attest. He believed that his… Read More Brother Jack
Julian Assange has articulated a critical view regarding the nature of warfare, particularly in relation to Afghanistan. He stated that the objective is to “wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite.” This suggests that the overarching aim is… Read More Assange Says Endless War is the Goal
Archbishop Sheen is expected to be Beatified this month. The Philosophy of Science written by Archbishop Sheen challenges a fundamental facet of the modern outlook: that science as such can answer ultimate questions about ourselves, the universe, and God. Disdaining mere discussion or mordant criticism of purely scientific conclusions, Sheen opens science to a realm… Read More Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen on the Philosophy of Science
“A little error in the beginning becomes a great error in the end.” — St. Thomas Aquinas. “He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead.’” –Lk.16:31. “See to it that no one makes a prey of you… Read More Pseudoscience and Origins
🎸Cf. Paul McCartney’s friendship with Ginsberg 🎸 Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation. The phenomenon of Allen Ginsberg. by Bruce Bawer, The New Criterion On Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, 1985. “I’m so lucky to be nutty.“—Allen Ginsberg, “Bop Lyrics” (1949). The very first poem in Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947-1980 [1] seems, in a way, to prophesy Ginsberg’s entire career. It… Read More “You can see God by sniffing the gas in a cotton.” — Allen Ginsberg
“And lawyers haven’t been this popular /Since Robespierre slaughtered half of France“. Lyrics Sex Kills Joni Mitchell “I pulled up behind a CadillacWe were waiting for the lightAnd I took a look at his license plateAnd it said “Just Ice”. Is justice just ice?Governed by greed and lust.Just the strong doing what they can.And the… Read More Sex Kills. Joni Mitchell pulls up the cultural shades. 2004.
When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the avant-garde was given diverse powerful platforms to announce that traditional art forms were passé, and art galleries exchanged space for the mystic likes of Picasso, Surrealism, and, in some degree, Andy Warhol, etc., they arguably prepared the way for the denial of natural gender distinctions and the… Read More From Rembrandt to Picasso
For many of the Dutch, the death of the 54 year old Pim Fortuyn, the flamboyant sociology professor turned right-wing politician in 2002 had something of the dreadful impact which September 11 (2001) had on Americans(*). Dark disorientation fell upon the nation known for its tolerance of almost everything secular, eccentric, and postmodern. Fortuyn was… Read More The Tragedies of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh
The following is a talk given at the American Chesterton Society annual conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, in June 2001. By Mark and Louise Zwick, Houston Catholic Worker Dorothy Day and G. K Chesterton were contemporaries. Both came into Catholicism in the 1920′s, Chesterton in 1922 at age 48 and Dorothy five years later at age… Read More G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day on Economics: Neither Socialism nor Capitalism
When I began this website it was after I had debated within myself, video podcasts or the written word? God knows I’m handsome enough to do a podcast 🙃. But then I thought that since I wanted to confess the faith, despite my frailties and sins, for my grandchildren’s generation especially, the written word is… Read More Podcast Video or the Written Word?
“Angels are often depicted in art playing stringed instruments like lutes, which are part of a larger family of musical instruments known as chordophones. These instruments produce sound through the vibration of strings, and lutes specifically have a body and a neck that stretches the strings, allowing for a variety of musical expressions. instrushare.com.au / Encyclopedia… Read More Heaven Must Love Stringed Instruments
U.N.-backed experts have found reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed war crimes in two airstrikes in Iran, which resulted in the deaths of civilians, including children. These findings include an attack on a school in Minab and a strike on a sports complex in Lamerd. polialert.com CBS News Recent Accusations of U.S. War Crimes… Read More U.S. Accused of War Crimes in Iran
Look at these two grinning pharaohs, and the massive global scam which their worker bees and ants are being commissioned to build, circuit by circuit, which could be destroyed in many ways if it didn’t serve the masters who made it their darling (beyond reckless) project, comparable to –they admit– the combined World Wars, and… Read More Pandora’s Misery. A.I.
Roberto de Mattei. “In the Gospels, Jesus makes use of many metaphors to describe the Church He founded. One of the most fitting is the image of the boat threatened by the tempest (Matt. 8:23–27; Mark 4:35–41; Luke 8:22–25). This image was often used by the Church Fathers and saints, who spoke of the Church… Read More The “true reform” that the Church needed in the 20th century
Dr. Arthur Holmes, History of Philosophy. Wheaton College: Repetitio est mater studiorum. This is an excellent series, it is very informative and fair to the ancients, to Catholic, Protestant and Enlightenment philosophies from Thales to Sartre and beyond. 81 comprehensive episodes. One can learn something new with every listen, or relisten, of any episode in… Read More History of Philosophy Lectures
Is A Personal* God Improbable? Or is it we who are improbable? Atheism has traditionally scoffed at belief in a God who is Personal or SupraPersonal. I’ve always found their position to be a counterintuitive curiosity. One of the reasons why is that I find myself, a personal being, to exist. I am here. You… Read More A Personal Universe. Creation.
“I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2 with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you… Read More St. Paul Prisoner for the Lord
Brennan loved to read, and as such, filled his books and talks with stories he’d found along the way, stories that always gave texture to the invasion of grace in our world. And in that spirit, I’d like to share with you a scene from Kent Meyers’ novel Twisted Tree; and although he has never… Read More Once a priest always a priest.
Tech Moguls, Financial Elites and the Danger of Oligarchy. “What Marxism got right is this: Social classes exist; some of the time, they have some common interests that conflict with the interests of other classes; and class inequality can, if allowed to grow too extreme, become a major social problem. Conservatives once widely recognized at least the… Read More What Marxism Got Right
