Columns
The English Martyrs and Tyburn’s Hidden Waters
In London, on the corner near the Marble Arch, there’s a noteworthy medallion on a traffic island commemorating Tyburn Tree. When English Catholics think of Tyburn, they think of the martyrs who died there – dragged through the streets after…
The Church in Dialogue: What Approach? And With Whom?
The Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes says that the Church has the duty of responding to “the perennial questions which men ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to…
Fulton Sheen: Casting Fire on the Earth
In 1945, Louis Budenz – a Communist activist and managing editor of the party’s newspaper The Daily Worker – was received back into the Catholic Church by Fulton Sheen. The two men had met earlier because Sheen had been publishing devastating…
Relaxing With the Bible Alone
At times it’s enjoyable to kick your feet up with the Ignatius Bible on your lap and spend a couple of hours reading the Gospels or some of those stirring Old Testament stories. The experience may be so absorbing that we might find it easy to…
Relaxing With the Bible Alone
At times it’s enjoyable to kick your feet up with the Ignatius Bible on your lap and spend a couple of hours reading the Gospels or some of those stirring Old Testament stories. The experience may be so absorbing that we might find it easy to…
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…