Legend has it that around 1910, The Times posed the question to a selection of eminent writers and thinkers: “What’s Wong with the World?” “Dear Sirs,” G.K. Chesterton replied: “I am.”
PEOPLE ARE DIFFICULT
THE FOUR QUADRANTS OF CONFORMISM
Graham’s thesis is that passively conventionally-minded are the largest group and the aggressively independent-minded (among whom he clearly counts himself) are the smallest.
We would probably all like to count ourselves among the independent-minded. But how deeply have the purportedly independent-minded in our culture truly thought?
WHAT WE’RE OBLIGATED TO SEE
I’ve been working on getting my next book, HARROWED: LIFE LESSONS FROM THE GARDEN, in publishable shape. And getting the dox together to apply for Irish citizenship. And writing my weekly column. And having many conversations per week with the many people of prayer, thought and heart who keep me afloat.
TIME TO THINK
Over the freakishly hot weekend, I enjoyed a couple of days indoors of reading, resting, pondering, and writing in my journal–and in the process learned some unsavory but nonetheless quite welcome things about myself!
THE EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA OF MASKING
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: “If you invest in the marriage of the inner and outer worlds by putting honest energy into dreaming a dream on, all the people in your life, maybe the whole of humankind, is enriched, though it may not produce the result your ego was seeking. This […]
24 YEARS A CATHOLIC
In solitary confinement, in the labor camps, Fr. Ciszek learned at last what St. Thérèse of Lisieux did in her Carmelite cell: “Each of us has no need to wonder about what God’s will must be for us; his will for us is clearly revealed in every situation of every day.”
MOTHER LOVE
“The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them,” observed Chesterton. “The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.”
Who better to restore that doctrine than women, who carry the evidence for miracles in our wombs?
GRATITUDE VERSUS COMPLAINING
The thing about complaining is generally other people don’t have the same complaints as you. They have other things–their own things–to worry about, and they’re having the graciousness not to impose them on you.
THE SCAPEGOAT
My take on the current cultural imposition of a kind of martial law as to how we’re to speak, act, and think.
Let’s not forget that another name for Satan is the Accuser. And I hope everyone’s read Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”
ÉLISABETH LESEUR: THE THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX FOR MARRIED WOMEN
Servant of God Élisabeth Leseur has been called the Thérèse of Lisieux for married women. Her husband was a crabby atheist.
USE LESS, SHARE MORE
“[M]ost of the want and suffering we see in our world today originates not from earth’s inability to provide but from our own inability to share….It is because so many of us consume far beyond our needs that a great many of us are left with almost nothing.”
From award-winning geobiologist Hope Moore’s “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here.”
DARK WOOD TO WHITE ROSE
Helen M. Luke’s “Dark Wood to White Rose” is a Jungian-Christian take on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”
GOOD THINGS OUT OF NAZARETH
The stock market is melting down, coronavirus is spreading its tentacles, we have in our day “no prince, prophet, or leader, no burnt offering, sacrifice, oblation, or incense, no place to offer first fruits, to find favor with you”…(Daniel 3:38). Yesterday morning on my way to Mass I pulled over to the curb in front of the […]
THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS
A RADIO INTERVIEW AND AN ADVENT REFLECTION FROM ESTHER DE WAAL’S “SEEKING GOD: THE WAY OF ST. BENEDICT.”