No no one is trying to make you a "villain." You continue to attribute the phrase "unfettered capitalism" to Pope Francis, but he did not say it. A writer for Foreign Policy, Christian Caryl, wrote an article in which he also attributed that phrase to the pope. I sent him a tweet that the Holy Father never used those words; he corrected the article. I sent you an email stating the same thing; you corrected nothing. Read more
If your child never once talks back to you, it is a good bet you will notice. If your child is never disobedient, if your child never has to be corrected, if your child in short behaves in a way no child or person has ever behaved, you will be aware. How they must have marveled at their daughter, and wondered at the purposes of God. I do not know whether Mary’s parents may have suspected that something related to the promised Messiah was the cause of her immaculate conception; I do not know whether they lived long enough to find out. Read more
So I was minding my own business, checking my Facebook the day before Thanksgiving. And I see a status update from Mark Shea to the effect that Rush Limbaugh has called the pope a Marxist. This is dropped on Catholics right before a long holiday weekend, before most of us have had a chance to read and digest all of what the pope has said. Perhaps the hope is that enough time will elapse, before we can respond intelligently, and the accusation will be fixed in the Publick Mind. Read more
Once Israel was in exile, and it is still in exile. It longed for Immanuel—the presence, not of a king, not even of a homeland, but of God. For the only real exile is exile from God. And so the experience of salvation is mainly an experience of waiting. And the discipline of watching refocuses us on what we really lack. The discipline of repentance refocuses us on who we really are. The discipline of prayer refocuses us on who we are meant to be and to whom we really belong. Read more
Thanksgiving is about people who left their home and gave up everything and endured hardship upon hardship for the freedom to worship God after their own conscience; and God sustained them, and they knew that it was right to take a day to stop their work and their pursuit of things. Seven things: Stay home; eat leftovers; pray; watch "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles"; remind yourself what Thanksgiving is about; stop; and make a different list. Read more
Christ is King. The Christ who came to us came to us as an infant; he came to us as a human being. That is not the Christ who will come again. When Christ comes again, He comes in glory and victorious; He comes as King of kings and Lord of lords. Should we not say that? Should we be offended at the sight of “Angry Jesus”? My guess is that the real discomfort that some have with this depiction of Jesus has a lot to do with latent sorrow and guilt. Read more
Definitions matter, and words mean things. But sloppy usages abound, and they encourage confused thinking and make-believe. If I say, “I am Catholic,” I ought to mean something more than that I show up at a particular building on Sundays. I ought to mean more than that I agree with a particular set of doctrines. Recently, Catholic converts like Bryan Cross and Jason Stellman have used the term “paradigm shift” to describe what conversion means. Read more
Earlier this month, Illinois became the sixteenth state to legalize same-sex "marriage." In truth, it is not marriage at all but rather the antithesis of it. Same-sex couples do not so much want to “marry” as they want to play make-believe and demand we confirm their fiction. But if that were bad enough, it became singularly wild when Monique Garcia and Ray Long, in the Chicago Tribune, made the staggering claim that anti-marriage advocates were inspired by the pope. Read more
Being the only sequel I would ever dare to write, and only because the last one was so popular. Books that changed your life is a strict standard. I. The Book of Common Prayer: one of only two books that hurled me in the direction of the Catholic Church; II. G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy: showing us that "to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad"; III. C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce: an allegory of freedom and joy; IV. Dante's Divine Comedy: which introduced me to the concept of the Beatific Vision; V. Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon: a novel about the value of the human person; VI. Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk: the yearning for something deeper than the world can provide; VII. Philip Roth's Patrimony: that rare and wondrous book that can make me cry. [Read more] Read more
I appreciate Mr. Leithart’s willingness to call Catholics his brothers. But when words like these come from a man who, just last month, called conversion to Catholicism a “tragedy,” they are empty of any sound and hollow of any sting. Mr. Leithart’s real point seems to be: A pox on both your churches. For he is oft at pains to point out how he differs from both “Protestantism” (which he defines as singular and fixed) and Catholicism (which he describes as always in flux). Read more
To Give a Defense
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In