2026
Chimes of Freedom – The Catholic Thing
This summer I got a new favorite song – Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It’s not a new song; it dates from the early 1960s. It remained entirely unknown to me until a few months back at Madison Square Garden, where Bruce Springsteen used it as…
Is Religious Faith Foolishness – or Wisdom?
Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is that something such that it has the remarkable capacity to evolve into the complex yet orderly universe we behold, so orderly that predictability and science are possible? Why do even the…
A Blindspot in Catholic Social Teaching: Generational Theft
Search the Catechism, the Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine, indeed the entire Vatican website – search all you want – for teaching about what we call the “national debt.” You will not find it. You can find teaching about the debt that…
Some Thoughts on Stoner Alley
One of my favorite, if cynical, figures from Reformation history and Europe’s Wars of Religion is Henri de Bourbon. Raised as a committed (Calvinist) Huguenot, he succeeded to the French throne as Henri IV. But in a dominantly Catholic nation,…
Defending the Social Kingship of Christ
There are few things more foreign to the modern imagination than the idea of a Christian king. We are accustomed to separating the sacred from the political, faith from public life, and the Church from the ordering of society. But for much of…
Synodality Will Kill Catholicism – The Catholic Thing
The Catholic Church has always distinguished itself from other Christian bodies by its claim to possess, and be bound by, a deposit of faith handed down from the Apostles. The Church comes from Christ, and the Church doesn’t invent, revise, or…
Good Questions – The Catholic Thing
Soon-to-be-Blessed Fulton Sheen once quipped, “The questions of God are more satisfying than the answers of man.” (That’s a variation on his friend G.K. Chesterton’s line, “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”)…
Remembering Ratzinger at Rimini – The Catholic Thing
Pope Leo XIV is traveling to Rimini today for the annual cultural festival organized by Communion and Liberation (CL). Few use its formal name, the “Meeting for Friendship Amongst Peoples.” It’s simply “Rimini.” It might be the only thing many…
Beauty: A True Human Need
As I write, on the day celebrated by some Orthodox as the feast of the Transfiguration on the Julian calendar, I’ve had several experiences of beauty just this morning. The sunrise through the West Virginia trees, the sunlight streaming into an…
Star Gazing – The Catholic Thing
I remember a moonless summer night at a campsite in North Dakota, almost forty years ago now, when the stars were so innumerable and bright, it was difficult to pick out the familiar constellations. The night was so black that I could barely see…