Someone once said “the best lies are wrapped around a core of truth“. In our ubiquitous media environment today, where Smartphones and video presentations of every kind are the only game in town, Christians and all persons of good will, are warned that we must be discerning and vigilant like never before. Ours is a… Read More The Best Lies
“Today the first and perhaps the only duty of the philosopher is to defend man against himself: to defend man against that extraordinary temptation toward inhumanity to which—almost without being aware of it—so many human beings today have yielded.” —- Gabriel Marcel Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan… Read More Thomas Merton on Creation: The Rain is Not for Sale
Sacred Tradition must have its unchangeable dogmatic guardrails, to be sure. And it surely does. But it must also have breadth and depth. It breathes anew with the Church in every age and is as powerful as the Sacred Scriptures, as dynamic as the multitudes of the Saints. It belongs to both past and present,… Read More Is Your View of “Tradition” Too Small?
Cynical news media daily turn many a local story, especially calamities, into national or international stories for political and financial purposes. The media bosses reap all the profit by spreading fear and shattering nerves. Motives are often far from noble despite all the self-righteous pretense. Henry David Thoreau anticipated this and there is lesson in… Read More Thoreau on “News” Media As the “Ruling Powers”
“It is vanity to desire a long life, and to have little care for a good life.” — Thomas a Kempis Tolkien mourned the decline of the Shire* i.e., …the real shire of his youth which he ever remembered and sought to salvage to the extent that he could. The Shire: the simplicity and beauty… Read More Tolkien’s Battle for the Shire. And for Us All.
“Americans are spending more and more time alone. Some are lonely. But many people—young men in particular—are actively choosing to spend much of their time in isolation, in front of screens. That proclivity is having a profound effect on individual well-being and on American’s “civic and psychic identity,” my colleague Derek Thompson writes in our new… Read More How Solitude is Rewiring American Identity
“Straight to Notre Dame…” Brought up in a strictly old Calvinist-Unitarian milieu in Concord with its Protestant disdain of Priests, some years later, upon his journey to Catholic Montreal, Thoreau felt compelled to take off his top hat as he slowly entered the Basilisca at the heart of French Canada and eyed its spiritual splendors.… Read More Henry David Thoreau on ‘This Catholic Religion’
“…recent changes to the way everyone gets their news—coupled with the style of news that dominates today—may not be good for mental and even physical health. “The way that news is presented and the way that we access news has changed significantly over the last 15 to 20 years,” says Graham Davey, a professor emeritus… Read More What is Monied “News” Consumption Doing to Us?
Our dysfunctional society must return to the hearth. By Paul Kingsnorth. “… The Irish government is currently campaigning against households which burn turf or wood, the former on the grounds of CO2 emissions, and the latter on the grounds of air quality. As ever, the campaign is driven from Dublin, and mostly takes Dublin sensibilities… Read More Firewood Will Save the West
‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes. Updated. “When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed,” Lola continued. “I started using my brain. It made me observe myself as a person. I’ve been trying to write a book, too. It’s like 12 pages now…You post something on social media, you don’t get enough likes, then… Read More “Social media and phones are not real life”
The New Oxford Review. In our October [1987] symposium, Thomas Molnar, an authority on all things French, threw out the intriguing morsel that the New Oxford Review seems to be following in the footsteps of Esprit, the French Catholic review founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier (who lived from 1905 to 1950). Although we would… Read More Are We “Personalists”?
By Laura Dassow Walls | Jul 21, 2017Publishers Weekly Laura Dassow Walls’s definitive biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, is an amazing achievement, a merger of comprehensiveness in content with pleasure in reading, following Thoreau’s progress as a writer and also as a reader, as well as his social and political involvements and scientific pursuits.… Read More 7 Reasons Why Henry David Thoreau Still Matters Today
A Personal Account Ross Gregory Douthat (born 1979) is an American political analyst, blogger, author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of topics, including the state of Christianity in America and “sustainable decadence” in contemporary society. Ross Douthat and Matt Lewis
Catholic Critique 