“Saints preserve us!” It never occurred to me, growing up, why my mother said this as often as she did. It seemed merely a coincidence that followed some misdemeanor one of us kids committed (which […]
The Russian soul is singularly situated toward an authentic understanding of freedom. Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, Solzhenitsyn and, most recently, Sergei Ovsiannikov, all endured the crucible of confinement. It was here—and not in the decadent pleasures of […]
“If the Church does not cleanse its own household, God surely will.” So warns artist and novelist Michael O’Brien whose contribution to this book is searing and poetically concentrated. It gives voice to the unspeakable. […]
In 1108 Tughtegin, the Turkic atabeg of Damascus, offered to trade Gervase of Bezoches, the captured crusader Prince of Galilee, for the city of Acre (and two smaller possessions). Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem, refused. […]
Anyone who has experienced the miracle of modern dentistry mourns little the passing of the Middle Ages. But Modernity (the period from the Renaissance to sometime in the twentieth-century), even with extraordinary advances in medicine […]
Some years ago, while on retreat with the Passionists, I listened to a Korean priest describe how he came to America. As a young man in Seoul he had money, girlfriends, a cool car, and […]
Death generally makes for unsettling reading. Unless, of course, we’re talking about true crime fanatics or mystery lovers. Those people can’t get enough of it. But death, especially our own—The Big One, the thing none […]
“Those who call themselves ‘Jews’, who are not really Jews, but are in fact Satan: You should learn to call them by their real name, ‘Satan;’ you are coming face-to-face with Satan, the Arch Deceiver, […]
“The Church became for me an inspirer of remembrance.” — Dom Erik Varden, OCSO The inferno at Cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris left behind more than smoke-damaged stained glass and charred eight-hundred-year-old oak beams. Lingering after the […]
The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem […]
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