Quo Vadis America? “Our nation is too full of those that are crying Down…Down with schools. Down with the churches. Down with teachers. Down with government. Down with the police. Can you build anything down? You cannot!” Archbishop Fulton Sheen exclaimed to his TV audiences about America during his popular TV show in the mid-1960s. He honed in […]
Quo Vadis America: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolution or St-Just? Read More »
Language: not so subtle pervisions One of the last classes I took to satisfy the number of courses needed for my undergraduate major in English was Linguistics. Taught by the head of the English department in the small college, it was, by far, one of the tougher courses for me. Not because the material was
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Religion begins with experience Religion does not start out with the notion of God. It starts with a personal experience, the overwhelming experience of ultimate belonging. Religion of the Heart Two pictures side by side in one frame hang on the wall of our Texas home. They reveal two views of a snowy cross-country skiing mountain
Revealed to the Childlike: Religion Begins with Experience Read More »
Defining freedom: The old/new lure of socialism On this July 4th weekend, we ponder the origins of American exceptionalism and consider the warnings of the founders about democracy. This old/new lure of socialism is antithetical to what we stand for in these United States, a nation founded under God. But for a growing number of
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On the Strange Symmetry of Beauty and Death By contemplating the beauty and use of each thing, [a man] is filled with love for the Creator. He surveys all visible things: the sky, the sun, moon, stars and clouds, rain, snow and hail … the four-legged animals, the wild beasts and animals and reptiles, all the
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Image Maura Harrison’s An Illustrated Comedy, Inferno Canto 1. In the middle of the journey of our life, November’s the month of the dead “I continue to think that we start from very different places on the question of death itself, what it is and what, if anything comes after it…I have trouble getting myself
November’s the Month of the Dead-Why Should We Care? Read More »
Pope John Paul In Arguing With the Pope, journalist Barbara Harrison wrote about Pope John Paul’s trip to Denver in August of 1993. He was there because it was the eighth World Youth Day. I remember little more than my complete sense of bafflement as I read her piece. How could this man evoke the thunderous adulation and
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Curbing the Aggressive, Capricious, Untrustworthy Intellect It’s a heck of a phrase, isn’t it? The adjectives strung together are strident and wholly negative modifiers of—the intellect. Huh? In our knowledge-obsessed twenty-first century, the statement, Curbing the Aggressive, Capricious, Untrustworthy Intellect sounds like heresy. Unless we stop, really HALT. And think about the amount of words we read, hear, and
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Photo Courtesy Mont Saint Michel Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael The stunning image is of Mont Saint Michel Abbey in Normandy, France, takes me back to a journey there before my conversion. That trip comes to mind because after my friend and I climbed the 350 steps to enter into the Abbey, we’d no idea
Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael: Essential Warriors? Read More »
The razor’s edge of forgiveness “Forgive your enemies. “ Since forgiveness was just as unnatural 2100 years ago as it is now, the Apostle Peter seeks to bind it. You will recall that Peter was a pious Jew and knew the Mosaic law. The law from Leviticus, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and in both
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