"The Church is filled with sinners and hypocrites and so can safely be ignored." - Typical Anti-Catholic Statement. "The Church is filled with sinners and hypocrites and to claim this is to claim what the Church herself teaches." - The Catholic Church "The Church is not justified when her children do not sin, but when they [...]
We have finally realized it. We have turned the corner. We have jumped the shark. We have crossed the Rubicon. We have passed the point of no return. And we have finally realized it. *** I have been hesitant to draw conclusions from the recent election. Yes, Obama is a horrific president, combining Republican zest for [...]
Here is an article by Anthony Esolen (who's as good as Peter Kreeft, IMHO, and whose translation and notes for Dante's Inferno are perhaps the best you'll find), and it starts with the question, "Why don't boys and girls hold hands any more?" Be advised that reading it might kind of break your heart. This article [...]
Talk to a typical Materialist-Atheist today (here's a picture of one below) ... ... and the dialogue will go like this ... SANE MAN: If there is nothing but matter, then what do you make of beauty, of love? MATERIALIST-ATHEIST: Beauty is subjective. SM: Then why discuss art? Why critique anything if there's no objective truth [...]
My friend, Ink, the world's most Catholic architect, writes in a combox here ... The modernist movement of the 1920s is the reason for the horrendous space ship churches we have today. Blame Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Also, the US was REALLY late to the modernism gig because they decided that they didn't [...]
"Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity" - Hebrews 6:1 *** Faith, Hope and Love are supernatural gifts. They perfect our natures, but they come from God - from beyond nature. They are graces. And like all graces, we must cooperate with them for them to live and be [...]
There is in all of reality an inherent quality that we deny at our peril. Dorothy L. Sayers calls it "judgment". It is what tragedy is all about. Take Shakespeare's Macbeth. Of all of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, Macbeth pushes the limits furthest. Hungry for power and security, he not only oversteps the moral law via murder, but he [...]
My wife Karen has me read to her the daily Mass readings, followed by commentaries from two different books. The one book, as I've pointed out earlier, sometimes has dreadful commentaries. Today's was pretty bad, for example. Taking "you knit me together in my mother's womb" from Psalm 139, the commentary has the reader imagine his [...]
If we persist in love and persist in hope, carrying our crosses for that purpose, Victory is assured us. This means that we can be Victorious in Sorrow, as was Our Lady. The point is that we must continue to love and continue to hope, even when those we love and those for whom we hope [...]
Yes, he was the most important person in my life, but I had had enough of him. You couldn't fake your way through a rehearsal with Jiman. He was the most exacting and challenging director I had ever had. He was the first person who showed me that acting required the engagement of the whole self [...]
