Jayd Henricks: Authentic happiness is hampered by confusion about human nature. Reclaiming of our sanity around sex and gender is a necessary first step to the happiness we all desire. We are all designed to seek meaning – which has historically been informed by faith. But in recent decades, religion has been rapidly disappearing from the […]
Fr. Gerald E. Murray: A Church in which each person recognizes himself in his personally curated set of beliefs, may promise satisfaction. But it’s a make-believe, delusional religion of self-worship. The Instrumentum Laboris [IL] (Working Document) for the October Synod on Synodality, released June 20, embodies the now familiar pattern seen in the various stages of the synodal […]
Francis X. Maier: Nefarious is a film about demonic possession, a subject that often spells cinematic disaster. But this one is brilliantly acted and spiritually powerful, which makes it hard to dismiss or forget. One of the delights – if that’s the right word – of the recent film Nefarious is the bone-headedness of its professional reviewers. One critic […]
John Grondelski: This year is the centennial of Calvin Coolidge’s inauguration and recalls not only a different age for fathers and sons, but much more. The day that Calvin Coolidge succeeded Warren G. Harding as president his son, Calvin Jr., started work on a tobacco farm. Coolidge writes, “When one of his fellow laborers said to […]
Robert Royal: Toleration and openness are not infinitely elastic. Democratic institutions depend on principles and social habits derived from Judeo-Christian notions of liberty ordered to God. We’re quite prone, in these days of political hysteria and fragility, to blow up discrete incidents – sensationally circulated on social media – into cosmic proportions. But every now and […]
David Carlin: How strange it is that the most famous champions of that lovely dream, heaven-on-earth, should turn out to be mass murderers. Sometime between the 18th and 19th centuries a new type of human being appeared in Europe. Not a biologically new type. No, a new psychological type. Let’s call this type homo utopianus. For […]
Francis X. Maier: We live in a time in which America’s future is at risk by methodically undermining the nature of the family, the memory of our culture, and the founding spirit of our nation . . . in other words, the things that anchor our identity as a free people. The strip of Pennsylvania that […]
Anthony Esolen: Jeannine Gramick, a nun, indulges men who dress up as Catholic nuns. Does she also condone their grooming, enticing, and seducing? Ever quick to embarrass faithful Catholics who do the hard and thankless work of attempting to reintroduce sanity to a society gone mad with sexual sin, and rendered lonely and embittered amidst the […]
Note: I’ve been reading for years – in great souls like Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, Ratzinger, and many others – how “beauty will save the world.” It seems more often that it takes many of us on a joyride to Hades. But it’s a part of our tradition that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty (the three transcendentals) are the main […]
Father Jerry J. Pokorsky: Science is the study of the handiwork of God. Christians must not object to legitimate science, but we must object to the abuse of science. There is an instructive story about an American hostage who asks his Iranian captors to listen to reason. They agree, but add, “Then we kill you.” Ideologues […]
David Carlin: Transgender ideologues are nothing less than monsters. And the very worst monster of this kind is the parent (usually a mother) who encourages her little boy/girl to believe that he/she is a girl/boy. Just as there are degrees of hot and cold, so there are degrees of political leftism, some very mild, some stronger, […]
Michael Pakaluk: The life of Benjamin Ferencz was defined by his defense of the innocent. On Good Friday, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials died at an assisted living home in Boynton Beach, Florida. Benjamin Ferencz was 103 years old. Three years earlier, his wife, Gertrude, had passed away. They were married in […]
Randall Smith: It is easy enough to believe in a “god” – a god of power – but a Creator-God of selfless love? It is, admittedly, “mysterious.” I have on occasion presented students with the famous proofs for the existence of God. Many students are amazed to find that one can actually approach the question about God […]
Elizabeth A. Mitchell: The role of real men on the front lines of the culture war is irreplaceable because the battle is for the soul of humanity. My father was a boy during the London Blitz. My grandfather recounts how one day he drove into London to find his office building in rubble. No files, no […]
Note: The following text is a slightly edited version of remarks that the author gave recently at the Catholic Information Center in Washington D.C. to mark the publication of her book Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited, with an introduction by the late Cardinal George Pell. – Robert Royal Mary Eberstadt: As pressure mounts on the Church to capitulate […]