Jesus Christ
Itching for New Foundations – The Catholic Thing
Ask an educated Catholic what the two leading teachings of Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum are, and, if he knows anything at all about this foundational text of modern Catholic social teaching, he will likely say that it endorses labor…
The Devil and the Duckspeakers
Every few years, I reread a couple of my favorite authors. George Orwell, despite his disdain for things Catholic, has always been on my list. This time I paid special attention to his essay, “The Principles of Newspeak.” He appended it to his…
Lex Movendi, Lex Intelligendi – The Catholic Thing
My family and I spend a few months out of the year in Nova Scotia, in a part of the province that was once overwhelmingly Catholic. The congregations are aging, partly because a lot of young people leave the island for work far away, and partly,…
Peter Kreeft Comes Home – The Catholic Thing
Chesterton once said that there are two ways of getting home. One of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place. Since the Church is our true home, we could say that the first is a good…
Pro-Choice ‘Catholic’? – The Catholic Thing
So, Cardinal Cupich has decided to honor pro-abortion Senator Dick Durbin. The chancery office says that they are honoring him for things other than his support for abortion, but that’s like honoring Bill Cosby for the wonderful things he did…
Embracing the Call – The Catholic Thing
People often ask me what they can do – or what should we all be doing – to deal with the many challenges we face, not only the obvious ones like wars, injustices, poverty, and so forth, but fundamental questions about what human life is and what…
Blinding Wealth – The Catholic Thing
The haunting story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is perhaps best understood in reverse, through the lens of where we find them at the end of the story. The status of each in the afterlife – the rich man’s suffering and Lazarus’s…
AI: Nearness to the Beast
In 1984, as a young man of nineteen, I returned from a year of testing my vocation to the religious life. We had been deprived, or rather liberated, from the television for that period. On my short vacation afterwards, I went off to Blockbuster…