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03.16.10
Hadley Arkes
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03.15.10
Brad Miner
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03.12.10
Mary Eberstadt
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03.11.10
George J. Marlin
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03.09.10
Patrick Fagan
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ARCHIVES
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H.L. Mencken offered a caricature of the man who never quite understands: If we say we are appalled by demagoguery, he thinks we are against democracy; and if we are reluctant to buy the “cancer... |
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A couple of years ago, I wrote a book called Smear Tactics and in the process developed a good nose for the ways by which certain members of the Fourth Estate mount spurious attacks against public fig... |
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Asking someone who scribbles for a living to meditate on the Deadly Sin of Pride is like asking an alcoholic to name his poison. The danger isn’t that he’ll fail to answer. It’s rath... |
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What should Catholics think about the recent phenomenon known as the Tea Party? Its members and sympathizers are often characterized as racist, fanatical extremists bent on destroying the Obama presid... |
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Recently I received an email about my findings about social trends in America from an eminent social scientist at an Ivy League university: “Dear Pat: Showing these bi-variate comparisons as you... |
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A student at Christ the King Seminary in East Aurora, New York, asked if I had a copy of Jacques Maritain’s Heroic Democracy, which I had cited in the Life of the Mind. But I no longer could fin... |
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If we wanted to put today’s question in the respectful, multiculturally sensitive form it often gets in the mainstream press, it might go something like: Are Catholics callous fanatics? Do we on... |
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It used to be you had to go out and find porn. It was always furtive because it was always public. Whether walking into a sticky theater or a smelly porn shop, almost always in some broken down neighb... |
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Dear Dr. New Age,
I’d like your sage advice on a difficult personal question. I have a friend who says he is a Christian. We’ve been friends for a long time and every once in awhi... |
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In his Angelus message of February 21, Benedict XVI remarked: “Lent is like a long ‘retreat’ in which to re-enter oneself and listen to God's voice in order to overcome the temptatio... |
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Scene: Claremont, California. I’m on the West Coast, trying out, as lectures, material from a new manuscript. On a bus passing by I see a large ad with a picture: a man of middle years, unshaven... |
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John Timothy McNicholas, Cincinnati’s archbishop from 1925 until 1950, went to a New York convention in 1933 and heard the Apostolic Delegate to the United States, Amleto Cicognani (fu... |
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The Jewish philosopher and theologian, Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), observed that Jews, Muslims, and Christians share a common belief that the world is created by God. Maimonides, following in the tr... |
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Thursday, 25 February 2010 |
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Lent
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By James V. Schall, S.J.
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“Let us, I say, consider who Christ is . . .”
These are words from Newman on Lent in one of his Parochial and Plain Sermons (VI, 5). He begins: “First, Christ is God: from eternity ... |
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This past year, secularists have been celebrating the centennial of the birth of one of their ideological heroes, Oxford don Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997).
Born in Riga, Professor Berlin and his fami... |
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Last summer, as distant church bells tolled at 12:00 p.m., I heard a group of ladies recall stopping to pray the Angelus as Catholic grammar school students. One said she could not remember the prayer... |
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Editor's note: Our tech hosting company has been making improvements to its platform which will help in the long run. Unfortunately, in the short run, the tech changes made the Comment function inoper... |
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Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen has written a book that has reopened a rather vociferous squabble about what constitutes torture. The debate has a special resonance in the Catholic world since ... |
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Was the greatest English writer of all time a secret Roman Catholic?
I’m referring, of course, to William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the playwright and member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men,... |
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In the United Kingdom, a sweeping piece of proposed legislation known as the “Equality Bill” sought to install various homosexual “rights” and cast opposition to them as discri... |
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The Scene: Virginia Beach, Regent University, early February, a conference at the Reagan Symposium on “The Future of the Culture.” I lead with a talk on “A Touch for First Principles... |
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Editor’s note: John O’Callaghan, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame, gave these remarks at the inauguration of Th... |
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Oprah Winfrey recently lined up a series on alternative communities and wanted Catholic nuns to be a part of the mix. Sounds easy enough, when you consider that Oprah can get almost anybody to talk ab... |
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The January 26, 2010 Science section of The New York Times carried an article by St. Louis writer Alicia von Stamwitz titled “An Ill Father, a Life-or-Death Decision,” which described her ... |
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Wednesday, 10 February 2010 |
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Diversity
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By James V. Schall, S.J.
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Among governments and on campuses today in the Western world, (but revealingly, not anywhere else), “diversity” has suddenly become a prevalent, if not defining, word. We do not seek truth... |
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Beware that sneaky word, “triumphalism.” It’s neutrally defined by the OED as “excessive exultation over one’s success or achievements.” But it has legitimate uses,... |
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S: My young friend, Glaucon, how good to meet you here. How are your studies coming? Are you learning things that elevate the soul, which you might share with me? I have just come from the agora. You ... |
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If a state amendment recognizing the personhood of the unborn child came before the U.S. Supreme Court today, it wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance of being constitutionally approved by thi... |
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There is a lot of thinking, or something like thinking, going on these days about what “well-being” really means. How do we define or measure human well-being? French President Nicolas Sar... |
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Only the dullest Christian will fail to wonder about the “lost years of Jesus” – that period in our Lord’s life between (more or less) his twelfth and thirtieth birthdays.
It&... |
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Bruce Fingerhut, in South Bend, had kept us posted from the hospital and then the hospice. We had been stunned already two weeks earlier, when we had received the report—wrong, as it turned out&... |
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Monday, 01 February 2010 |
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Ralph McInerny (1929-2010)
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By Robert Royal, Michael Novak, Bruce Fingerhut, and John O’Callaghan
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Everything Is Different
Robert Royal
Our dear friend and regular TCT contributor Ralph McInerny died Friday at age eighty of complications, weeks after surgery for esophageal cancer. To say th... |
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It’s not exactly news that marriage is in crisis. Marriage rates are dropping, which means the next generations will be weaker because children won’t have the benefit of the love of both p... |
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In this Year for Priests, called by Pope Benedict XVI in order “to deepen the commitment of all priests to interior renewal for the sake of a stronger and more incisive witness to the Gospel in ... |
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We hear a little about Muslim persecution of Christians these days, though not much. But is anyone aware of the much larger and continuing evil presence that violates the rights and very lives of Cath... |
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Tuesday, 26 January 2010 |
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Ivory Tower
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By James V. Schall, S. J.
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The term “ivory tower” is in fact biblical, from the Song of Songs (7:4). But it came to be applied to the Blessed Mother and is indeed one of the names given to her in the Litany, “... |
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The images coming out of Haiti are enough to render anyone speechless. I just saw a black boy on television, maybe three-years-old, lying semi-conscious with eyes half-open on a blanket in one of the ... |
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What faithful Catholic did not ponder late Tuesday night that the election of Scott Brown to the “Kennedy seat” was God's judgment on Kennedyism. Kennedyism being the proposition that one ... |
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On January 11, Pope Benedict XVI met with the diplomats accredited to the Holy See for his traditional New Year’s greeting. In the Vatican’s grand Sala Regia, under frescoes depicting grea... |
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There was a time when Islam was an historical, literary, or cinematic curiosity with little or no purchase on the American imagination and no measurable impact on our lives. That began to change in ea... |
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A dispatch from the People’s Republic of Amherst, Massachusetts, a place in America, but not quite of it. I am back from Washington, for about ten days, to do some work on the house and baby-sit... |
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I was in Haiti last week and heard one explanation for the persistence of Voodoo in the Western hemisphere’s poorest nation: “Many believe that God doesn’t have time for Haiti and th... |
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“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves.&rdqu... |
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Each year during Christmas week, philosophy professors from around the country (perhaps in confused imitation of the ancient Magi) travel east for the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Asso... |
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In 1907, St. Pius X asserted in the encyclical Pascendi: “It is pride which fills Modernists with that self-assurance by which they consider themselves and pose as the rule for all. It is pride ... |
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New Year’s Day is an astronomical event. Earth, which we human beings inhabit (we were given no other choice), revolves about the Sun, one of the bejillions of stars populating the cosmos. This ... |
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I’ve been looking over a very interesting book – John Allen’s The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church. I know – but don’t let the trendy... |
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In what has become an ongoing skirmish over homosexual rights, the United Nations General Assembly two weeks ago narrowly rejected a reference to a controversial re-writing of a foundational human rig... |
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President Obama has banished the phrase “war on terror” from the lexicon of the American national security bureaucracy. Some welcomed this change because terror is a means used by an enemy... |
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Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman sustained at least seven concussions over a twelve year NFL career. He brings a perspective few can to the long-term effects of head injuries on players. Aikman pr... |
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As Justice Holmes taught us, it was the purpose of the modern project in law to remove the connection between morality and law. And yet that connection between the logic of morals and the logic of law... |
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Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) is the best TV miniseries ever – and the most star-studded, with then thirty-three-year-old Robert Powell as Christ and co-starring Olivia Huss... |
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The image is of a young woman in her bedroom. If you can tell from a portrait that a young woman is beautiful and pure, through and through, you can see it here. She looks like someone you’d wan... |
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Thursday, 31 December 2009 |
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Te Deum Laudamus
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By James V. Schall, S.J.
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On the Feast of Pope St. Sylvester I (d. 335), the evening of the last day of the year, the Holy Father is present in a Roman Church for that solemn traditional chant of praise, Te Deum, Laudamus. Giv... |
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For years countless heroes, Catholic and not, sung and unsung, have labored courageously to save the institution of marriage from the onslaught of those who seek to redefine it. Behind this vociferous... |
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For those of us who love and admire the British Catholic journalist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), he lives still in his Inverness cape, with sword cane and pince-nez. And he lives bec... |
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Gentle Reader, I hope Santa was good to you and, even more, that you were good to others in this season. As Robert Wilken reminded us Friday, we have time yet before the traditional twelve days come t... |
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TO ALL OF OUR READERS: A BLESSED CHRISTMAS FROM
THE CATHOLIC THING
– Robert Royal, Brad Miner, and Elizabeth McCoy
For the world Christmas day is the end of something, for the Church... |
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Enough already about the war against Christmas. What about the war against Santa Claus? From the chic precincts of the Internet to the tony classrooms where progressive thought also rules, the ruthles... |
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Wednesday, 23 December 2009 |
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Grace Revealed
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By James V. Schall, S.J.
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In the readings from Paul during Christmas season, we do not find vivid scenes of a crib, donkeys, and shepherds. We do not hear angels singing on high, or see the Holy Family, the inn, or Magi pullin... |
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We interrupt our usual column, as varied as its business has been, just to take account of the ending of this year, grim from start to finish – and yet, to find in this Christmas season, the fli... |
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In T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Journey of the Magi,” one of the Wise Men sums up the famous trio’s trek: “A hard time we had of it,” he says, and that hardly does the j... |
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Ed's Note: Thanks again to all who have responded to our end-of-year appeal for The Catholic Thing. We're very near our goal, but this is the last day before Christmas week - and all of us n... |
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Thursday, 17 December 2009 |
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Tiger, Tiger
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By James V. Schall, S. J.
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William Blake’s poem no doubt comes to many minds these days: “Tiger! Tiger! burning bright / In the forests of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?&r... |
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Wednesday, 16 December 2009 |
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ABC v. Ireland
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By William Saunders
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Ed's Note - Our deep thanks to all of you who responded so generously to our request for support yesterday. We're in a difficult economic situation nationally and we know that many of you have to make... |
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In just a few days, we will come to the end of the first decade of the third Christian millennium. Incredible. It seems only a very short time ago that John Paul the Great called the new millennium a ... |
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Pray for me, folks, because I’m nostalgic for the Crusades.
Of course a twenty-first-century fellow can’t really be nostalgic for the eleventh or twelfth centuries, since nostalgia proper... |
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There is so much good news in the Church these days that it is hard to know where to start. One could tick off half a dozen cases, including the visit of Barack Obama to Notre Dame, which became the o... |
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If we wanted to add a twentieth-century name to the list of prophets, I would nominate Robert Nisbet (1914-1996), who would not be surprised by recent revelations that an elite group of global-warming... |
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Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who was revered by millions of Americans because of his great gifts in preaching and writing about the truths of the Catholi... |
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Catholicism is an adventuresome religion, not designed for dullards, sissies, or the faint-hearted. Actually, it is not a “religion” at all. Religion is about what obliges men to God insof... |
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In a story worked into a legend, a visitor to a famous campus was shown the chapel, along with several of the principal buildings, but then turned to ask his guide, “Would you show me now the un... |
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Last week, while my family gorged on turkey and pumpkin pie, I feasted on Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic bestseller, The Road, followed by the newly released film adaptation of the novel. Th... |
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"Contemporary man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, or if he listens to teachers, he does so because they are witnesses.” John Paul II and Benedict XVI have quoted these... |
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The grounds of civilization are found in the Apology of Socrates: “It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen of the jury; it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster th... |
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One temptation of the Christmas season is to approach the birth of the Savior solely as a familiar and comforting winter’s tale. For children, of course, that’s enough. And even for adults... |
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"There are as many opinions as there are men,” wrote the ancient Roman playwright Terence. Such is the case with views of the Novus Ordo Missae, the new rite of the Mass that was born on th... |
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Not long ago I applied to join the Sons of the American Revolution, which is open to all those who are directly descended through the male line from any man who carried a weapon in the Continental Arm... |
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Thursday, 26 November 2009 |
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Thanks
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By Brad Miner
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We make much of our Thanksgiving holiday, which has become mostly about food and football – two of my favorite things – but which in many families also includes a prayer. When I was a Meth... |
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In an October 26, 2009 op-ed in the New York Daily News, Princeton University professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, applauded New York’s nanny-state measures (i.e., abolition of trans fats in re... |
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Phillip Jackson, Class of 1985 at Amherst, went on to law school at Yale. He entered the practice of law in Hawaii – and then, drawn irresistibly to church, he was encouraged after a short while... |
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One of the gems of Church teaching is the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium – The Light of the Nations. This past Saturday (November 21) was the forty-fift... |
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Having funded groups that support abortion and “same sex marriage,” and funneled more than $7 million to ACORN over the span of a decade, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD)... |
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Nine months of the Obama administration have prompted me to flee, not to New Zealand or Argentina, but rather to Blandings Castle. In such locations, considerable disarray exists. Blandings is more li... |
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It is no exaggeration to say that Catholicism today, not only in America but across the world, resembles nothing so much as a gigantic pizzeria – one in which some people spend their days enjo... |
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The hero of Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy Sword of Honour, in the slough of despond in wartime Cairo, goes to a priest to confess that he has wished to be dead. “How many times?” the priest... |
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I’m told by reliable people that there are readers of The Catholic Thing still struggling with mainstream-media addictions. If so, some of you may have been surprised to find your humble editor-... |
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A good hearted and extremely well-connected Catholic came up to me at a Catholic event this week in Washington D.C. and said, “Now don’t you see the value of engagement? At the Ken... |
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Some people, young and old, have trouble with tradition: older folks because they no longer remember where it came from; youngsters because they never learned it. It’s the way we’ve always... |
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These days, it’s not easy being an Ordinary in America’s northeastern inner-city dioceses. These bishops have had to cope with rapidly changing demographics that have seriously impacted th... |
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Election night: a good night for the conservative party, with the voters in Virginia and New Jersey evidently registering a rejection of the Obama Administration and its works. But one could watch eve... |
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Today, the Pope Pius V University in Rome will be the setting for a day-long conference with the arresting title, “The Scientific Impossibility of Evolution.” The sponsors of the even... |
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When I was a physics major in college, my father happened to be a professor of Medieval Philosophy at the same institution. One day, after lecturing on Dante and the Music of the Spheres, he happened ... |
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Many Catholic converts speak of coming home. Not me. For years, I felt I had left home and cast my lot with strange, argumentative folks. I missed the incomparable language of Tommy Cranmer (most vaci... |
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I have had occasion to mention before my boyhood friend who, when asked what he thought of the end of the world, answered, “Which end?”
People of my vintage have been inhabiting an esch... |
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Tuesday, 03 November 2009 |
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All Saints' Day
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By James V. Schall, S. J.
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As you may have noticed, the Mass readings on All Saints’ Day are among the most beautiful of the liturgical year. The first reading is from Apocalypse 7: “After that I saw a huge number, ... |
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A Notre Dame professor reminded me this week of an old football saying: offense sells seats, but defense wins games. Painfully true about the problems of the Irish this year, but I’ve never thou... |
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The government of France has fined the Church of Scientology almost a million dollars for the regular practice of their “religion,” which France says is not a religion at all but a crimina... |
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For an American Catholic, it can be gratifying when U.S. policy converges with cherished goals espoused by the Church. Those occasions can bring together our love for two of the crucial institutions i... |
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Throughout October there’s been plenty of fussing over the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Editorials world wide have saluted China’s growing ... |
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Who would have imagined, at the beginning of the year, that we would find ourselves, in the fall, at a moment of desperation for a new administration of the far Left, supported by heavy congressional ... |
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There are Catholics who believe in Christ but are agnostic about the other spiritual beings of Christian doctrine: angels (and demons). This may be why Anne Rice begins her new novel, Angel Time, with... |
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As the Second Vatican Council developed, traditional Catholics in England were distressed because they saw Rome giving up the Old Latin Mass for a vernacular both shallow and shabby. Further, as Evely... |
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An ex-student e-mailed me from Ireland. What he reported could have happened in many places, in many lands. His account follows: “I was walking down the street this Sunday in one of Dublin&rsquo... |
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Wednesday, 21 October 2009 |
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Can God Be Trusted?
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By Thomas D. Williams, LC
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The recent economic crisis has been above all a crisis of trust. Financial institutions have bent over backwards to convince us that they are trustworthy, since their entire enterprise depends on cons... |
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Comparing two of the greatest religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, David Swenson wrote: “Newman was looking for the objectively true church so that he might join it. Kierkegaard was see... |
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I stumbled on a discussion of religion in a major secular magazine the other day in which Catholicism came up. One of the participants in the conversation scoffed at the Church for thinking that you c... |
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You are reaching for the gravy this Thanksgiving. Your family is gathered around the dinner table in a warm moment. Your freshman daughter is just home from her first semester in college, the one that... |
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Thursday, 15 October 2009 |
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The Feast of Faith
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By David G. Bonagura, Jr.
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Bowing low, the priest takes the host with the thumb and forefinger of each hand as he prays the words of consecration: “Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my body, which will be given u... |
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On September 15, “StandForMarriageMaine.com” released a television ad. In it, Scott Fitzgibbon, a professor at Boston College Law School (a Catholic institution), argued for the traditiona... |
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At the height of the presidential campaign last year around this time, Professor Richard Epstein offered an estimate of his former colleague at the law school at the University of Chicago. Putting asi... |
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Was there ever a more ambitious or successful book than St. Augustine of Hippo’s De Civitate Dei? Written in the aftermath of the Visigoths’ early fifth-century sack of Rome, The City of G... |
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Twenty years ago, Ignatius Press published my Another Sort of Learning. My initial “short” subtitle to this book was: “How to Get an Education Even If Still in College.&rdquo... |
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When he wanted to send a message to politicians worldwide, John Paul II declared Saint Thomas More the Patron of Statesmen and Politicians (October 31, 2000). He listed various reasons for making this... |
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This Friday (October 9) will be the fifty-first anniversary of Pope Pius XII’s death. Last year around this time, when Benedict XVI was planning a trip to Israel, the old controversy about Pius ... |
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Flying into Dublin, the North American whose business is in the west, retrieves his luggage, checks out his rental car, looks unfazed at the morning traffic, and decides to begin his westward journey.... |
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Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori, the leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States, recently remarked that it is a “heresy” to believe "we can be saved as individuals." As... |
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Interior Secretary Ken Salazar reacted to an August report that emissions from coal-fired power plants have led to widespread mercury pollution in our rivers and streams by saying: "this science ... |
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Today more than a few baptized Catholics, for various reasons that include indifference, have not received the sacrament of confirmation. This is not the first time in history that growing numbers of ... |
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Wednesday, 30 September 2009 |
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JOHNSON
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By James V. Schall, S.J.
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Of the four greatest minds with whom I commune regularly, to wit, Aristotle, Aquinas, Samuel Johnson, and Chesterton, three were obese. Aristotle was merely solidly built. If modern campaigns against ... |
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Those vexing hearings over Robert Bork, for his nomination to the Supreme Court, back in 1987, left enduring marks. They set lasting precedents for poisonous attacks on nominees to the Court, and they... |
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Editor's Note: Many thanks to all of you who contributed to our Fall Fundraising last week. We met our goal and, owing to your generosity, look forward to continue bringing you The Catholic Thing. - R... |
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Editor's Note: Today is the last day of the Fall Fund Drive. We're very close to our goal. Before you read Austin Ruse's encouraging words today, please, take a minute to do your part for The Catholic... |
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Editor's Note: Okay, it's Thursday and our Fall Fundraiser is nearly done. Lots of readers have responded generously. Have you? Just take a look at this lovely reminiscence by Ralph McInerny. What m... |
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Editor's note: Friends, if you missed our appeal on Monday, it's not too late to do your part in support of The Catholic Thing. Lots of your fellow readers already have, and we thank them all from t... |
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Editor's Note: Thanks to all the generous readers who responded to our appeal yesterday. Your support will help keep The Catholic Thing alive -- and very much kicking. And how about the rest of you?... |
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