Jesus Christ
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 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…
The Incarnation: Logos Becomes Man
It’s been thirty years since I entered the Church, but I am still learning more about what the birth of Christ (Christmas) really means, including that the Christmas Season only ended yesterday officially. Reading the Gospel of John, I find…
How They Died: Martyrdom of the Apostles
In The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that Christ invited St. Peter “to the supreme followship of martyrdom for the Lord he had denied. . .thereby forgiving him all his sins. In the life of Peter, grace and discipleship…
Freedom in the Ties That Bind
We Americans have a thing about freedom. We didn’t invent freedom – even in the limited sense of political freedom – though we sometimes like to think (and occasionally act) as though we have an unbreakable monopoly on it. Land of the free, and…