“Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream”—John Lennon Perhaps it is one of those curious fearful symmetries that the words of John Lennon quoted above are found in the Beatles’ album titled ‘Revolver’…and that he was finally gunned down, shot multiple times in the back by a “fan”. I grew up reading Kerouac… Read More John Lennon and The Seductions of Beautiful Nothing
“Over the years I have become more and more convinced that the ideologies of evil are profoundly rooted in the history of European philosophical thought. Here I should mention some aspects of European history, and especially its dominant cultural trends. When my encyclical on the Holy Spirit was published, there were some sharply negative reactions from… Read More Pope John Paul II on Enlightenment Errors
Or, where the Left would take us. by Roger Kimball.The New Criterion. On The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller. Michel Foucault’s personal perversions involved him in private tragedy. The celebration of his intellectual perversions by academics continues to be a public scandal. The career of this “representative man” of the twentieth century really represents one of… Read More The Perversions of Michel Foucault
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 elicited fear, which is the sign of a real miracle occuring in the midst of sane men and women, as witness the Gospel history: “A… Read More Jesus of Nazareth vs the Magicians and Empiricists
Put the news aside for a time. If unhappiness is growing consider it a reset signal to return to philosophy where all education and earthly wisdom began. …This is an excellent series, very informative and very fair to Catholic, Protestant and Enlightenment philosophies. Thales to Sartre and beyond. 81 comprehensive episodes. One can learn something… Read More Dr. Arthur Holmes Lectures. A History of Philosophy.
Suzannah Lipscomb “The decision to exercise the rights of his royal supremacy to decide theological doctrine and practice, despite Anne Boleyn’s fall and Henry’s remarriage to Jane Seymour (who was rumoured to be conservative in religion) came as a surprise to some European commentators, who had hoped for Henry’s return to the Catholic fold once… Read More Why Does Tudor History Matter— (& not Just for Britain)?
What Fulton J. Sheen saw so clearly that others seek to forget: We are only sojourners here in a strange and foreign land. “Our whole life ought to be one continued penance“. — Frs. Francis Spirago, Richard F. Clarke on Penance. Joel 2:12-13 “Yet even now,” says the Lord, “return to me with all of your heart,with… Read More Repentance and / or the American Dialectic
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
Trump joins other world leaders at “reopening” of Notre Dame Cathedral. What burned in that fire and what is possibly being reborn? Antichristic Uncertainties. 12/7/24 + March 2025. Christians reportedly suffering increasing persecution in Syria + UN ignores Persecution of Christians + “…more than two Christian monuments are targeted EVERY day in France” + At… Read More Antichristic Uncertainties
And ‘Being Beethoven‘ a BBC documentary chronicling his genius, tragedies and glory. Also, Damian Thompson asks why didn’t Beethoven go to Mass? Too, How did Beethoven feel about Napoleon? And Missa Solemnis. Beethoven and the Catholic Church .By Michael De Sapio.Crisis Magazine. Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart form the great trinity… Read More Beethoven and the Catholic Church
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
Before there was Gloria Steinem or Michel Foucault, there was Dada. And it was deadly serious. Kickoff, Demolition time. “Dada thrives on contradictions. It is creative and destructive. Dada denounces the world and wishes to save it.” So says one narrator of journalist-filmmaker Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Council of Great Britain documentary… Read More 1914. Europe After the Rain.
James Day. On September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI took to the dais of the University of Regensburg’s Aula Magna to offer a few “memories and reflections.” Contrary to the resulting rebukes, the 79-year-old pontiff knew exactly what he was doing. Catholic World Report Pope Benedict XVI took to the dais of the University of… Read More Benedict the Brave: The Regensburg Address. Islam, reason and faith.
“A perfect emblem for modern Ireland” — tho the real pagans of old [my ancestors – SH], whom she admires, would have sacrificed this one in a heartbeat “to make the crop grows”. “Bambie Ray Robinson (born 6 March 1993), known by their[a] stage name Bambie Thug, is an Irish singer-songwriter. They are known to mix numerous genres… Read More They appear to be Legion. Fr. Brendan Kilkoyne on Ireland’s Bambie Thug
…and an attack on the Created Order of the world. And, sadly, it makes the American “Mothers Day” an hypocritical national Joke. Tragically America is ever-evolving, via something akin to the Hegelian dialectic, farther and farther away from Christ. “Male and female he created them, and he blessed them”— Genesis 5:2 “The Biden administration’s Department… Read More Eliminating official use of ‘mother’ isn’t inclusive — it is waging war on Family
The Beatific Vision is the immediate and direct knowledge of God that the angels and the souls of the just enjoy in Heaven. 1 It is called “beatific” because in beholding God face-to-face, the created intelligence finds perfect happiness and fulfillment. 1 The Beatific Vision is a supernatural gift, beyond the natural capacity of the human intellect. 2 While reason… Read More The Beatific Vision
See Dr. Mark Miravalle talk below. Pope Leo XIII wrote, “… as soon as the constitution and the spirit of the masonic sect were clearly discovered by manifest signs of its actions, by the investigation of its causes, by publication of its laws, and of its rites and commentaries, with the addition often of the… Read More St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Popes & the Masonic Sect
The Compassionate Paradise of Antichrist. Jesus said, “And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold.” — Mt. 24:12 Dark, ghoulish films, television, news and “entertainment” with heavy does of sexual content accent increasing loneliness. —First, Ross Douthat. What Euthanasia Has Done to Canada. And Elsewhere: State suicide for depressed now normal… Apr.… Read More Why is Canada euthanising the poor?
Freemasonry’s relationship with Catholicism has been back in the news lately, so I thought it might be interesting to post this ancient (and technically crude) interview with former Freemason and now Catholic theologian, David L. Gray. Dr. Gray talks about his journey from one so-called Enlightenment to Jesus Christ, Alpha and Omega, the Light of… Read More An Ancient Interview With David L. Gray on Freemasonry
For some reason I thought it was another book about our frivolous TV shows and general culture (Seinfeld, Larry David’s vicious Curb Your Enthusiasm —pick your nonsense— and I already knew this about the culture. But then things got darker. Very recently I somehow bumped into this reading. I listened. I couldn’t have been more… Read More I’ve had the book for decades. But I never read it. “Shows About Nothing.”
Or how to squeeze Union Theological Seminary into two Millennia of unambiguous Catholic teaching. Raymond Brown’s Wayward Turn in Biblical Theory by Msgr. George A. Kelly Ignatius Press, San Francisco, CA, January / February Note: Raymond E. Brown was professor emeritus at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York City, where he taught for 29 years. He was… Read More Raymond E. Brown’s Mischievous Tactic: the “Scientifically Controlled Evidence”
A fascinating look at the devolution of culture and the arts over time through the lenses and timelines of Beat, Folk, and Rock ‘n Roll. Superseding orthodox Marxism and other political and social movements, theBeat Movement was the ovum of all later decadent movements in both cultures and music . The Encyclopedia Brittanica defined the… Read More Psychedelia, Beat, Folk, Rock’n’roll…and Us
“Pat Robinson has written in a book a few years ago that we should have a world government but only when the Messiah arrives. He wrote that that literally any attempt to receive world order before that time must be the work of the devil. Well, join me I am glad to sit here at… Read More Walter Cronkite, World Government and Satan
Evangelical Protestant Michael Jones explains here
…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
… in Liberalism. And why I can never see the Crucifixion of Our Lord in the same way after Holland’s momentous book Dominion. SH “Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of… Read More Historian Tom Holland on Losing His Faith
Jonathan Van Maren writes, “Tate is the personification of various internet subcultures, combining the critiques of the anti-feminist “manosphere” and the alt-right with the posture of a pickup artist. A self-described pimp who has stated he believes sexual fidelity is only for women, he made his millions running porn sites. He now uses social media… Read More Masculinity Without Virtue
Displaying Rainbow bullets and fighting whomever they’re commanded to fight. Marine Corp Goes Full Woke 2022. U.S. Marine Corps Goes Woke, Celebrates ‘Pride Month’ with Rainbow Bullets… Read it all * Sarah ArnoldDecember 22, 2022 10:00 PM Jae C. Hong In a world where everything that was once normal is now woke, it’s no surprise… Read More Serving [the Masonic] “God,” Country and Corps: Marine Corp Goes Full Woke
“A little error in the beginning becomes a great error in the end”— St. Thomas Aquinas. Against Polygenism.By: Dr. Kevin Mark, Kolbe CenterApril 22, 20230 “Would that We had not learned by experience how many ‘false apostles’ the present age has spawned! These are ‘deceitful workmen who transform themselves into apostles of Christ.’ Unless we… Read More Error In the Beginning. Great Error.
“I wonder how many readers are aware of the full extent of the threat to the faith posed by Modernism, “the synthesis of all heresies,” as St Pius X described it. Modernism is not simply a danger to Catholicism; it undermines the very basis of any form of religion that claims belief in a supernatural… Read More Michael Davies on Modernism
“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
Mary Harrington: “The era began in the mid-twentieth century, with a biomedical innovation that radically changed what it is to be a human, in the human social order: reproductive technology. The Pill was the first transhumanist technology: it set out not to fix something that was wrong with ‘normal’ human physiology — in the ameliorative… Read More The Pill was the first transhumanist technology.
Damian Thompson associate editor of The Spectator writes, “Ludwig van Beethoven had a profound faith in God. He was born and raised a Catholic and on his deathbed he asked to receive the Last Rites. He told the priest, ‘I thank you, ghostly sir – you have brought me comfort.’ One of his closest friends,… Read More Why didn’t Beethoven Go to Mass?
By Solange Hertz. The readers of Time magazine were assured in the summer of 1992 that “within the next hundred years … all states will recognize a single global authority.” The author of the article was Strobe Talbott, member of the CFR, former Rhodes Scholar and President Clinton’s roommate at Oxford. Mr. Talbott, at that… Read More The Family’s Threat to Utopia
The Telegraph, UK. Utopian solutions for saving the planet are doomed to failure – and worse. We must wake up before it is too late. Jordan Peterson 28 October 2022 •l This winter, millions of British citizens, including children, will be tipped, or dumped, into energy poverty severe enough to risk permanent damage to their health. Cold,… Read More Eco-extremists are leading the world towards despair, poverty, and starvation
There are many people who will cite the West as something which is under threat and something for which we should be prepared to fight to defend. Depending on which defender of the West is pontificating, the threat comes from Russia, or from Islam, or from China, or from some enemy within the West itself.… Read More Is the West Worth Defending? By Joseph Pearce.
“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
Morgan appears to be wilfully theologically illiterate, practically an imbecile in these matters*. He seems to have no understanding of creation and the Creator’s binary commandments which exist for our good. He feigns sorrow over young people supposedly leaving the Church, but is blind to the fact that it is precisely the Wokish parts of… Read More Piers Morgan Votes Barrabas
Dr. Lyell Asher.June 10, 2022. “[It is] critical that we ask: In whose interest is it to persuade students that a university is a “home” where they’re not to think? In whose interest is it to persuade them that they’re fragile, that they’re threatened, that words are violence, that an imagined slight is as bad… Read More Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults
Catholic Critique 