“For the scientist who has lived by faith in the power of his reason, the story ends like a bad dream” —Robert Jastrow, American NASA astronomer, physicist and cosmologist. “Around every circle another circle can be drawn, under every deep another deep opens” —Ralph Waldo Emerson “Ever learning but never able to come to a… Read More The Mystery That Dwarfs
Jesus Christ, “given unto us” (Isa 9.6): This true Man has been the subject of the mostsublime contemplation, worship, and love imaginable for over two thousand years. Even agnostics marvel over his Person and teachings. And His enemies, of whatever variety, obsess over Him to this very day. For in that crib, the Church attests,… Read More Jesus Christ, Light of the World
I do not consider Pope Benedict XVI to have been perfect. Which pope in history was? Even Pius XII allowed the infamous Teilhard de Chardin to remain a priest and teacher in the Church. Why he did so I will never know. And he ordained or consecrated many of the leading luminaries who went on… Read More Benedict XVI by Joseph Pearce
Apropos of everything: Because Heidegger forsook his early roots in Thomistic [objective] Christian philosophy, the unapologetic Nazi who enjoyed philosophy was forced to create a new and eccentric philosophical superstructure [undecipherable and irrelevant to most human beings] to dodge the consequent existential void. It was necessary because his system toppled the Holy Trinity and so… Read More Being and Bunk.
The other side of the Eucharist is friendship. It often happens that week after week, year after year, Christians sit and kneel next to practical strangers in church on Sundays. They leave Mass as they entered, nodding and saying hello to people they do not ever really come to know. And in our time it… Read More The Deep Truths in Fritz Eichenberg’s ‘The Lord’s Supper’
Are Catholic prelates really moving in on Francis with a view to ousting him as a report indicates? …or is it all so much Progressivist paranoia and guilt, knowing how much they have deformed the Faith since putting Francis on the Chair of Peter? “Vatican plot to force Pope Francis to resign: Conservatives wage ‘secret… Read More Moving in on Francis?
You are creating a new world, soldier!Isn’t that what you signed up to do,to kill and die for, soldier? You will…ridicule enemy cultureswreck economiesmock traditionsterrorize their“moral absolutes” You willcut off their ballsthrow their titsinto cold tin basinsturn boys into girlsgirls into boysmothers into MILFSfathers into jokeschurches into effeminate echoschildren into pin-ups! You will teach themthat… Read More You Will Bring Liberation, Soldier!
When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Avant-garde were given 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 binary… Read More From Rembrandt to Picasso
Tolkien Mourned the Decline of the Shire* …the real shire of his youth which he ever remembered and sought to salvage to the extent that he could; the simplicity and beauty of the land and villages which he grew up in, the countryside, the mountains and streams, the beauty of the day and the night… Read More Tolkien’s Battle for the Shire. And for Us All.
On March 21, 1960, at approximately 2 PM, Ricardo Klement got off the bus in the San Fernando section of Buenos Aires, Argentina. In his hands was a bouquet of flowers. He was greeted at the door of 16 Garibaldi Street by his wife and children who appeared dressed for a special occasion. Little did… Read More Authority After Adolph Eichmann
When Magicians work their tricks, people applaud, are charmed, and wonder aloud how they ever did that. But with the Lord Jesus Christ it was very different. His saving deeds evoked fear, the sign of a real miracle occuring in the midst of sane men and women. As witness the Gospel history: “A large crowd… Read More Jesus of Nazareth vs Magicians and Empiricists
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 are… Read More I Am Therefore I Think
“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
Day after day a million confused emotions ebbed and flowed and sometimes clashed within him. After a time, when he had come to feel particularly ill, and knew that he would soon be placing himself into Hospice, he wondered what he should do at last. It is said that there are two kinds of people:… Read More Seeing The First time
We who are alive today have lived in extraordinary times. Never in history were so many ordinary people lured off the narrow way by so many lying signs, wonders and temptations. Few of us came through it unwounded. There is little romanticism in not being a hero. Many men and women courageously crawl through their… Read More Our Saving Wounds
When Scripture’s creation-based, antropocentric revelation is rejected, and an evolutionary animal continuum (from amoeba to man) is presupposed as the only reality, then human beings begin taking their cues for behavior from the animal world. This rationalization has reached tragically absurd levels today as witness postmodernist writer Steven Shaviro’s longing for the sexual autonomy of… Read More From Creation and Family to the Petri Dish
“One body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Father of us all” — Eph. 4: 4-6 Every ecclesial community brings its tradition(s) to bear in the exegesis and understanding of Scripture. Even independent Protestant Fundamentalist pastors and larger Protestant denominations employ their traditions [i.e., their received community understanding of texts] as a… Read More Catholicism, Tradition and Protestantism
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”
“May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world— St. Paul, Galatians 6:14 “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and… Read More Kerygma. Finding Our Way Home Again.
“…that you may know how you ought to behave yourself self in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” — 1 Timothy 3:15 The living Word of God dwells within, and never apart from, the Pillar and Ground of Truth, the Interpreting Church… Read More White Lies
In a 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
In Evelyn Waugh’s stunning classic, Brideshead Revisited, there is a scene which presses on my mind these days as I ponder so many forces gathering against a Church weakened greatly by the sins of her own children, both clerical and lay. All of us. It is the time when Sebastian, Lord Alex Marchmain’s idiosyncratic, drunkard, but… Read More Lord Marchmain’s Long Hate
So-called ‘Liberals’ have a philosophical problem in this country and beyond. On the one hand they heartily indulge and enjoy the sexual anarchy granted by the succeeding regimes since the 1950’s and 1960’s; on the other hand they tend to deplore the lawlessness of American foreign policy / imperialism / warmaking. They do not see… Read More When the State is Ultimate
…who kindly blesses each one us from the sidewalk when we come out of Church. Or when we pass on the street. Once when I needed to Confess my sins only to find it was one of those rare days when the church was closed and there would be no Confessions, he happened to be… Read More I know a priest
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
John Paul II: “To do penance means, above all, to re-establish the balance and harmony broken by sin, to change directions at the cost of sacrifice” (Reconciliation and Penance, 26, emphasis added) Looking back, it seems to me I was only somewhat converted (if one can say that) to my Catholic Faith when I was… Read More Late A Disciple
“God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. — Frederich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 109. For the Neo-modernist or Progressivist Catholic today, the Traditional understanding of God is… Read More Progressivist Theology. What it is.
“God is dead but given the way of men there may be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we will have to vanquish his shadow, too.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, # 109 At the very dawn of the 20th century, on 25 August in the year… Read More “Straying, as through infinite nothingness”: The Collapse of Nietzsche
“Conveniently, communists can always detach themselves from the horrors of the past.” By Richard Mason If someone were to ask you to think of either extreme of the political spectrum, odds are you would immediately picture a swastika at one end, and a hammer and sickle at the other. Regardless of your views of the… Read More Why It’s Time to Treat the Hammer and Sickle Like the Swastika
“A major area of distress for [Dorothy Day] in the 1970’s was what seemed to her the erosion occurring in the spiritual life of her fellow Catholics, including those in the Catholic Worker movement. More than ever Catholics seemed attentive to social issues she had been raising for forty years, but they were increasingly neglectful… Read More The Real Dorothy Day
In recent months, we have witnessed a string of very disappointing and frankly disgraceful incidents concerning the implementation of draconian Covid-19 restrictions. This time, the targets of the Government’s enforcement program, as well as the harassment of a certain councillor in Limerick and her political tag-alongs, were the parishioners of several Catholic churches throughout the… Read More Deplorable Restrictions on Religious Practice in Ireland
Amazon: Best-selling author Peter Kreeft presents a series of brilliant essays about many of the issues that increasingly divide our Western civilization and culture. He states that “these essays are not new proposals or solutions to today’s problems. They are old. They have been tried, and have worked. They have made people happy and good.… Read More Peter Kreeft’s How to Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas
Is there evidence of Intelligent life on other planets? None that we can observe. Anywhere, whatsoever: See here… But what about Microbial life of some sort? What if we find water is or was on other planets, and also found evidence of microbes, now or at one time? The universe is the ‘House’ or neighborhood that… Read More The Splendor of Life on Other Planets?
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