I held back from writing about Fifty Shades of Grey because I hadn’t read the book or seen the movie and don’ t want to. I didn’t want to give yet more publicity for something which decent people should hardly be aware of. This is the stuff of dark dungeons of desire, and not M&S is mainstream. Not only mainstream, but huge On 1 August 2012, Amazon UK announced that it had sold more copies of Fifty Shades of Grey than it had the... Read more

My father used to tithe 15% of his income. Really. That was before taxes…and he had five children and a retail clothing store that was struggling to stay afloat. Once when I was in eighth grade we had to do a pie chart of our family’s finances for an economics class. I can remember making a slice of the pice showing 15% going to charitable giving. The teacher walked up behind me, looked over my shoulder and said, “I think... Read more

Here is my article for National Catholic Register for Ash Wednesday. It celebrates being wrong, “for whenever men are right they are not young” Ash Wednesday is the day when we wear our error on our brow. The ashes declare to the world, “I’m wrong. It was me.” With the ashes, we put our hands in the air and admit that it’s our fault. You ask, “What’s wrong with the world?” With the ashes we say, “I am. It’s me.... Read more

Take a moment to consider these two photographs, and figure out how they are connected. A comfortable Oxford intellectual continually spouts anti-religious hate speech with impunity. Indeed, he is lauded as a leading intellectual and a darling of the chattering classes. Some people even read his books, and his books, and his constant stream of hatred against religion soon spills over into action because religion can’t be a problem without religious people. You then have a classic scapegoating mechanism arising... Read more

Some time ago I had a bust up with a colleague. He walked into my office and insulted me straight up. It was real ugly. He accused me of stuff of which I was innocent. So I asked him to sit down. Although I was furious I said, “You have just insulted me very badly. You’ve said I am a bad priest and that I don’t care for my people. You’ve implied that I use parish money to fund my... Read more

After the brutal murder of twenty one Coptic Christians we have to look again at martyrdom. This is not long ago and far away. It is here. It is now. It is on your screen. John Allen’s excellent The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution explores the world wide phenomenon of the persecution of Christians. Today my latest article for CRUX explores the mystery of martyrdom. What is it that causes such hatred of Christians?... Read more

Graeme Wood writes the best analysis and description of the horror of ISIS here at The Atlantic. He goes into detail about the roots of ISIS, its relationship to mainstream Islam and the ambitions of the Caliphate. He explains how ISIS combines not only a horribly literalistic interpretation of the Koran, but also how it is interlaced with radical Muslim apocalyptic visions. He sums up the whole article pretty well with this paragraph The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of... Read more

  Lent is here and I’ll bet you haven’t made any preparations yet. If so, the new media offers instant answers. Much of the material is free If you’re looking for online resources for Lent, Aggie Catholics have their annual Lent mega post here Don’t forget you can still sign up for Dynamic Catholic’s free weekly Lent video here My free weekly newsletter is starting up again for Lent. You can sign up here You can order my Lent books... Read more