The Dispatch
Love and the Skeptic
Saint Valentine’s Day is a good time to remind ourselves that human love is an imitation, a reflection, of the divine love that created all […]
Josef Pieper
The Dispatch
Learning to do nothing: The art of sacred silence
“All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” Blaise Pascal, who offers this insight, also notes in his Pensées that we fear silence more […]
The Dispatch
Mary, Martha, and “the better part”
Readings: • Gen 18:1-10a • Ps 15:2-3, 3-4, 5 • Col 1:24-28 • Lk 10:38-42 Americans are, generally speaking, a pragmatic and practical people. We know how to get things done, how to organize, how […]
Essay
On breaking a dominant lie
We all know the nursery rhyme: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall/ Humpty Dumpty had a great fall/ all the king’s horses and all the king’s men/ couldn’t put Humpty together again. It’s a kindergarten […]
The Dispatch
The fallow fields of academe and the lost art of disputatio
Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the MacArthur Genius Award in 2017 at the age of 41. She served as architect of the Pulitzer-Prize winning 1619 Project in 2019. Leading historians from the left and the right […]
Columns
Thomism and Political Liberalism, Part 3
This is the third and last part of my discussion of Thomism and political liberalism. From the first two essays (see here and here) I think that we can conclude that one important thing that […]
Books
The Intelligibility of Reality and the Priority to Love
Near the beginning of D.C. Schindler’s important and impressive book Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Cascade Books, 2018), he quotes a prescient passage from G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics. Chesterton […]
Essay
Catholic universities, contemplation, and our cultural future
For better or for worse, universities are shapers of culture, not the only ones, of course, but decisive ones. The reason for this isn’t mysterious. Most of our cultural elites – the people in the […]
Books
Revisiting “The Spirit of the Liturgy”
Last year was a year of many anniversaries. One that was perhaps less noticed was the fortieth anniversary of Ignatius Press. As part of that observance, its founder, Father Joseph Fessio, decided to reprint what […]
The Dispatch
On evangelizing the culture and why hobbits (really) need the Shire
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Catholics today will argue about the best way to evangelize the culture. One of the more typical approaches puts a high premium on what you might call a […]