If music be the food of love . . . play on. So Shakespeare, the greatest of English writers, told us in his play Twelfth Night.Music is the food of love . .. and we should play on even as the light of Epiphany, the next great feast of the Church, the celebration of revelation, is tomorrow. In the “normal time” that is coming, we can look back fondly on the harmony music brings to our lives. Twelfth Night has a... Read more

Sarcasm kills. That doesn’t mean a person should never be sarcastic, just that he should be sarcastic about ideas or things he wants to wither and die. This can be quite appropriate for a political candidacy, for example, though never for the candidate!  We love our enemies, but we can be quite sarcastic toward their ambitions. Epiphany is coming, the feast of the Wise Men, and it is worth nothing that they were not Wise Guys. At this point my children... Read more

We have ornaments from our childhoods and ornaments from the childhoods of each of our children. They have been out for the last two months and soon they will return to storage. Next Christmas will not be like this Christmas, yet they will (God willing!) still be there. A different tree will hold the same ornaments. A different year will bring new friends to our Saint Stephen’s Day feast. We will play new games, but sing the old carols. The... Read more

Farmers always had to work, so few people have ever gotten “work free” holy days. Still, people in Christian nations have traditionally been eager to make the central activity of their lives church, family, and feasting. We can work with zeal, but never with a commitment so absolute that when the Church says “party” we refuse. The problem is that few of us have been trained in how to party and so we do it badly. Many Americans have resources... Read more

2015 cannot end fast enough. The old order declined all over the world. Life can be sweet in the last few years of a dying regime, decadence mixes with opulence to produce a beautiful twilight. We had bread in the form of cheaper gasoline and our circuses hit Imax regularly, but the vitality seemed gone. Voters in both parties looked at their candidates for higher office with aversion: no transformational Reagan or Obama in sight. 2015 was a year when Christians all over... Read more

Christian education is free to experiment and institute large scale changes. To be Christian, we must celebrate excellence and virtue. The culture has sanctified vice and equality. Long term you cannot have both virtue and morality based on personal preference and excellence in a system that prizes equal outcomes above all. In the short term, the decay in our culture will be hard to see. Like an inexperienced gamer who buys a character with high XP that he does not know... Read more

We are halfway through the Feast and those who do not know how to Feast well are already growing tired of jollity. There is great skill to living well and one of those skills gentlemen and ladies used to be taught was pacing a party. Ancients would fast for forty days and party for weeks. We get tired after a few days at home. This is because we party badly . . . like children and not as adults. An... Read more

There are twelve days of Christmas. Secular culture tries to make me feast during the Advent fast and then wants to cheat me out of most of the Christmas feast. For proper jollification, I need twelve days to give gifts to the awesome people in my life. Gift giving is a symbol of love. . .not love . . . and money need not be spent. There is plenty of advice freely given on gift giving, some better than others,... Read more