We immerse ourselves daily in news, in reports, in never-ending drama and events. We see or hear the sins of many, many others, endlessly; but do we neglect our own souls, our own need for healing? Thomas a Kempis teaches, “Rest from the inordinate desire of knowledge, for therein is found much distraction and deceit.… Read More Saint Francis de Sales’ Consoling Words on Forgiveness and Self knowledge
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 is titled “In Society,” and it dates… Read More “You can see God by sniffing the gas in a cotton.” — Allen Ginsberg
When a friend called me this morning with the news that Susan Sontag had died at the age 71, just about the first thing I thought was, “well, we’ll have a huge, hagiographical, front-page obituary tomorrow in The New York Times.” Check to see if I am correct. In the meantime, as you prepare yourself… Read More Susan Sontag: a Prediction by Roger Kimball. 2004
Updated / Apostasy is cruel. Not only does it walk “the broad way which leads to eternal destruction” (Matthew 7:13), but increasingly, in an age of bewilderment and despair, it leads straightway to temporal destruction as well, whether from AIDS, Fentanyl, euthanasia, or death by one’s own hand. Apostasy is cruel because, as St. Paul… Read More Of UFOs, Apostasy, and Death
Me: Please tell me why the French national anthem began The Beatles’ All You Need is Love. A.I. The Beatles opened “All You Need Is Love” with the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” to symbolize unity and internationalism for a global audience. When The Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love” on June 25, 1967,… Read More The Beatles, A.I., and La Marseillaise
Note: To be sure, we are called to be the most earnest peacemakers and never to stop working hard towards peace. Yet, alas, in our own time, World War II showed again why it is not wrong to thrust out violent invaders when earnest efforts towards peace have failed. However we are taught that we… Read More St. Joan Confronts Utopia
Good Fences, Shared Bounty. Can it ever be wise to separate compassion, reasonable limits and common sense? If you have followed the immigration debates in the West in recent decades you will have long ago gotten a glimpse of the fears, greed, fanaticism and wars which, often enough, make many peoples in our post 9/11… Read More Immigration, Birds of a Feather and Trojan Horses
Norman Geisler, the Evangelical scholar who studied at Loyola University, Chicago, reflects on Jean Paul Sartre’s atheism: “It should be noted … that Sartre’s attempt to eliminate God is seriously flawed. First of all, he constructs a straw God by defining him as “self-caused.” Most theists do not believe God is a self-caused being; they… Read More Sartre’s Humanism
Existentialist philosophy and analysis, to the extent that it measures “the predicament of man and his world in the state of estrangement” (Paul Tillich) corroborates what Christian theology has always referred to as Original Sin. As a school of philosophy it seems pretty well dead now, but important insights of the original existentialists remain valid,… Read More Existence and the Word
Dr. Ralph Martin: “How can someone be appointed Archbishop of Washington, DC, after expressing views contrary to the Catholic faith? This is the question being raised by many within the American Catholic Church after Cardinal Robert McElroy’s recent appointment as Archbishop of Washington, DC. Appointments like this are causing many Catholics to wonder what is… Read More A Time of Trouble. Cardinal Robert McElroy.
President Donald J. Trump. Executive Order.January 20, 2025. “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Purpose.The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment… Read More Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship
Note: Mary Daly died in January 2010. It is good to be tolerant, even of incoherent things, we are told today. The devil himself ought to be given a seat at the table. So the courts have ruled. But that can’t stop us from noticing that Mary Daly represents the meltdown of the dissident transgressive… Read More Mary Daly: The Witch of Boston College
From the December 2024 New Oxford Review symposium Catholics and Political Life. 1. It is hard for me to understand how a nation can be an experiment. Such a notion presupposes that the United States is not actually a nation but an idea, something that underlies our many attempts, from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush,… Read More Thomas Storck on the American Experiment
The Catholic people as individual souls and peoples, wherever we may be, may adapt and make our own the profession, pledge and spirit found in the salutary Preamble of the 1937 Irish Constitution which once restored* the Holy Trinity to absolute centrality and ultimacy, above all mere politics, for all humankind: “In the Name of… Read More To Which We Pledge Heart, Mind and Soul
Fr. Joel S. Panzer, The Catholic Answer and EWTN, 1996 When did the Catholic Church condemn slavery? According to some notable figures, the Church did not finally condemn slavery until recently. Judge John T. Noonan stated that it was not until 1890 that the Church condemned the institution of slavery, lagging behind laws enacted to… Read More The Popes and Slavery: Setting the Record Straight
“We acknowledge our wickedness, O Lord, and the iniquity of our fathers, for we have sinned against you.” Jeremiah 14: Though our iniquities testify against us, act, O Lord, for your name’s sake;for our backslidings are many; we have sinned against you.8 O you hope of Israel, its savior in time of trouble,why should you be like a stranger in the land, like a traveler… Read More “Our backslidings are many; we have sinned against you”
“Whittaker Chambers is best known today as the veteran Soviet spy who became, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s words, “the most important American defector from Communism” when he testified against members of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Yet Chambers did more than reject Communism: He revealed a key problem with modern liberalism. In… Read More Mark Groubert On the Whittaker Chamber – Alger Hiss Case
“… the political fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have a great deal to answer for. For two centuries, his sentimentalizing utopian rhetoric has provided despots of all description with a means of pursuing conformity while praising freedom. It is a neat trick. Words like “freedom” and “virtue” were ever on Rousseau’s lips. But freedom for him… Read More Jean-Jacques Rosseau and the Antinomian Principle
It is one thing for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be able to assimilate such a phenomenal amount of information. It’s another thing to be able to parse the information so effortlessly— and instantly? Anybody with a real brain must pay attention. Where is this taking us? To darkness or to mutual respect? That, as I… Read More “God,” Robots (AI), Christianity and Religion in General
…the National Lawyers Guild, and the 65 Project. Last Spring famed attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has been ostracized by many or most of his present and old friends for speaking out against legal violations in what he calls the political prosecution of former President Donald Trump, warned about “what is coming,” saying repression is going… Read More Dershowitz Warns Against Stanford Law Radicals
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” — Bhagavad Gita, Robert Oppenheimer “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” — JFK, American University, 1963 “The dropping of the… Read More Oppenheimer and The End of Time.
Our children are the Guinea Pigs. By Christopher Rufo. First Things Magazine | The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin raised his glass to a group of artists assembled at the home of famed writer Maxim Gorky in 1932. “The ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he said, explaining that the communists… Read More Reengineering the Human Soul
By Solange Hertz Any citizen doubting that the Old Religion of the alchemists is the state religion of the U.S. need only make a pilgrimage to the nation’s capital, beginning with the Prayer Room established in the Capitol by joint resolution of Congress in 1954. He will find there for his devotion a small central… Read More Our State Religion
“Separation of church and state? I can think of a couple of other things I’d like to see separated from the state, or connected with the state in only a slender and indirect fashion. One of them is the school. The other is the home… Americans have largely taken for granted a monstrous bit of… Read More Anthony Esolen on Separation of Home and State
“Do you know that we are tremendously powerful already? … I’ve reckoned them all up: a teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle is on our side. The lawyer who defends an educated murderer because he is more cultured than his victims … is one of us…. The juries who… Read More Dostoevski on the Revolutionaries
By far the most important book on Western revolutionary culture I’ve read in over a decade. Indispensable. A REVIEW OF THE LONG MARCH. BY ROGER KIMBALL. Encounter Books, 2000.By Bill Muehlenberg In many ways the cultural revolution of the 60s has been as influential and momentous as other great social upheavals, such as the Industrial, French or… Read More The Long March by Roger Kimball
From the New Oxford Review: “The European Court of Human Rights ruled that a topless feminist who acted out the aborting of Jesus in a Paris church in 2013 was exercising “freedom of expression” (The Christian Post, Oct. 24). “Bare-breasted and covered in pro-abortion slogans, Éloïse Bouton entered L’église de la Madeleine wearing a blue veil… Read More Aborting ‘Jesus’ = Free Speech
See many more of Mr. Horn’s episodes on his playlists at YouTube. “After his conversion to the Catholic faith, Trent Horn earned master’s degrees in the fields of theology, philosophy, and bioethics. He serves as a staff apologist for Catholic Answers, where he specializes in teaching Catholics to graciously and persuasively engage those who disagree… Read More The Most Important Biblical-Catholic Apologist Today
Opinion. Is International Law True Law?27th Sept. 2021. Lawteacher.net. Western nations drag other nations before International courts but often refuse to be judged there themselves. Is this just? Just what is International Law? And a discussion of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution . International Law. “Despite the fact that international law is the… Read More Is International Law True Law?
Linking antiwar, anti racism and abortion. Opinion. Bill Ayers and His Media Groupies by Cliff Kincaid. And brought up to date— especially regarding “the Catholic movement” and the abortion connection— in a Spotify podcast below (August 2022). Bill Ayers’ claim that the Weather Underground bombed property, not people, in order to protest the Vietnam War, is two lies… Read More What’s been happening?
… against all control of or exaggerated curbs on press freedom in the name of National Security — or a Government of Secrecy. John F. Kennedy’s Address before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C., April 20, 1961. “The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as… Read More JFK On A Truly Free & Responsible Press. 1961.
“The French Jacobins selected France as savior of the world. The new Jacobins have anointed the United States.” Pedro L. Gonzalez.Aug 25. “I’ve been reading The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State by Claes G. Ryn, first published in 1991. It’s a short but insightful polemic about the pernicious influence of neoconservatism—the “New Jacobinism”—on American… Read More Keeping Out the Jacobins
“The heroic phase of the 18th-century Enlightenment purported to have freed humankind of antique superstition and the demons of the irrational, but the horrors of the 20th century gave the lie to that triumphalism. Far from humane liberation, 20th-century Europeans had plunged into decades of savage barbarism.” — Stuart Walton It is a sad fact… Read More Aesthetics, Relativism and the Enlightenment
First Things. Despite his humble origins as a baker’s son from Trastevere, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, longtime curial head of the Holy Office (“successor to the Inquisition,” in journalese) and scourge of the nouvelle théologie of the 1950s, was a formidable figure in pre-conciliar Catholicism. Ottaviani’s approach to theology was neatly summarized in the Latin motto of his… Read More George Weigel on The Last Laugh of Alfredo Ottaviani
By a.d. 1200, Europe was in the process of changing from a medieval agricultural economy to one based upon interregional trade, which contributed to the growth of large urban centers. Many of these cities evolved from successful trade fairs established along busy trade routes. In turn, they engendered a commercial revolution that would eventually change… Read More Medieval Fun and Commerce: Trade Fairs and the Commercial Revolution
Catholic Critique 