Columns
St. Aelred of Rievaulx – The Catholic Thing
Among the thrills in being flat out immobile, or fairly close to it, is that it keeps one out of bookstores. One finally has an opportunity to read what one was putting off until retirement. Irresponsible book-buyers have invariably collected…
The Special Anthropology of Transgenderism
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on January 13 in the cases of Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., involving Idaho and West Virginia laws banning males who identify as female from competing in girls’ sports. Most commentators…
Evangelizing in Silence – The Catholic Thing
A few years back, there was some energy and zeal around something people called “the new evangelization.” I never quite knew what it meant, but I am in favor of evangelizing, so anything serving that goal seems good to me. But as long as…
Pope Leo’s New Notes – The Catholic Thing
The late American Catholic novelist Walker Percy once remarked that the contemporary vision of a human being is a brain connected to a pair of “genitals” (the actual term he used is a bit salty for the present site). There seems to be nothing in…
The Extraordinary in Ordinary Time
With Christmas behind us and as we now proceed through “Ordinary Time,” we have the opportunity to contemplate the full, extraordinary mystery of God’s descent into human life and our ascent into the divine. The Church Fathers called this…
The Return of ‘Quo Vadis’
This column is slightly adapted from the introduction to the new Mount Titano Media republication of the classic novel. Zealously celebrated and thoroughly thumbed by the literarily inclined up until, say, 1960, Quo Vadis held pride of place on…
The Church and Darwin – The Catholic Thing
One of the oddest things about my evangelical upbringing was the catechesis I received in creationism. Because of a certain hyper-literalist interpretation of the Book of Genesis, the evangelical churches that my family attended periodically…
The Lives of Christian Moms
When I taught CCD, I used to tell my kids, ‘If everybody else is doing it, it’s probably wrong.’ The Christian life is difficult. The truth is difficult.” So said Kelley (as we may call her) when I interviewed her, in January 1999, a few…
The New Iconoclasm: What We’ve Forgotten
A few years ago, I attended a conference given by a wise Benedictine abbot, who recounted an experience he had during a trip to the Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos. What he described was an episode directly related to the veneration of…
Looking for Lost Heads – The Catholic Thing
In P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster, Lady Glossip, mother of an eligible daughter, asks Bertie Wooster how he would support a wife. His answer: “Well, I suppose it depends on whose wife it was. A little gentle pressure beneath the elbow…