As a house, Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable and compact; but as a cottage it was defective, for the building was regular, the roof was tiled, the window shutters were not painted green, nor were the walls covered with honeysuckles. — Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility Read more
Magisterium is an orchestra of sorts, with full choir, playing original compositions as well as a number of classic standards from every generation. Their members are veteran musicians drawn from every country of the world, much like The College of Cardinals, but Magisterium is a significantly larger ensemble with a great many more releases. Their original choral works are all written in Latin; but most unusually the words are translated and re-recorded in the local language before release in any... Read more
A boy, son of the chief of a clan living in a mound on an English moor of uncertain date, beginning to get his growth, and terribly full of himself, finds and kills his counterpart from an enemy tribe of water dwellers in order to steal the ornate golden torc from around his neck. Along with the torc he receives his enemy’s dying curse. His little sister is with him, and indeed inadvertently made it possible for him to find... Read more
So you’re a big city, and people wind up dead, and they have no loved ones to claim them (or, in some tragic cases, the loved ones are simply too slow or are not notified in time); and you have to bury them. Where do you put them? If you’re New York City, you have prisoners bury them in mass graves on Hart Island, a small piece of land at the mouth of Long Island Sound. Over 900,000 bodies have... Read more
Last month I spent many pixels criticizing a particularly bad and ineffective way of explaining to someone the error of their ways and calling them to repentance. It seems only fair that I should spend some time talking about the right way to do it. Um. Well. You know, I’m not sure I know just what the right way is, as a general thing. It’s a hard thing to do. (Q: How do porcupines make love? A: Very carefully.) But... Read more
A couple of weeks ago I compared the interior life to a kitchen remodel. You’ve got a skilled workman doing a complicated job, and while he’s responsible for the work, you still need to cooperate with him or the job won’t get done. But there’s another way that the interior life is similar to a kitchen remodel: it’s not always obvious what’s going on. In fact, it’s usually not obvious what’s going on. Some weeks it seems like there’s a... Read more
I wrote this review of Stephen King’s Everything’s Eventual in March of 2013. Reading this book was a mistake. You almost certainly misunderstood that last statement. I like Stephen King. He’s a darn good story teller, and he’s darn good at evoking just the response he wants (which, it seems to me, isn’t quite the same thing). I use to buy all of his books as they came out, until I got to Insomnia, which was frankly a waste of... Read more
Dominican philosopher Scholasticism was his game Summa Theologica Aquinas was his name. Well, OK, I don’t suppose this can be called popular music, even if they did spoof “Venus” by Bananarama. Still, I think this counts as pretty much the most popular pop song written about Thomas Aquinas, so it’s good in my book. Plus, whoever wrote the lyrics actually knew something about St. Thomas. In internet terms it’s an oldie! Don’t miss it if you can! Read more
My latest column for CatholicMom concerns one of the Church’s first apologists, St. Justin Martyr, and how he helped me come back to the Catholic Church. Read more
In 1948, Josef Pieper published a selection of short texts from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, specifically, those texts he wanted to bring to the attention of his friends so that they could come to understand the character and thought of St. Thomas. The texts (often no more than a sentence) are arranged in a particular order by topic, so as to lead the reader through the philosophical thought of the saint. The book is entitled The Human Wisdom... Read more
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