Michael Hanby

“Facts and great personages in world history occur, as it were, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The Synod on Synodality seems destined to confirm Marx’s words (themselves a revision of Hegel). The tragedy arises from the deep theological and philosophical division . . . . Continue Reading »

Augusto Del Noce (1910–89) is one of those rare thinkers whose thought becomes truer as time passes. His penetrating account of a totalitarianism of permanent revolution, driven by scientism and eroticism, abetted unwittingly by the “dialoguing” and “listening” Church, depicts our age more . . . . Continue Reading »

As society crumbles, can the Church restore a new kind of universal communion? Continue Reading »

Modernity does not just refer to the time in which we happen to live, the era that follows the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Those who first recognized themselves as modern defined themselves self-consciously over against the ages that preceded them, though few probably grasped in its fullness . . . . Continue Reading »

So much for the “new paradigm.” With the Church now mired in its most severe crisis since the Protestant Reformation, the heady talk of last spring now seems as distant as the “Catholic moment” or the “springtime of evangelization.” Rightly or wrongly, the idea of a gauzy mercy without . . . . Continue Reading »

We seem to have lost our capacity to think and speak about “LGBT identity” without capitulating to it. Continue Reading »

The Crisis of Modernityby augusto del nocetranslated by carlo lancellottimcgill-queens, 336 pages, $110 There is no greater ideologue, nor any more earnest in his self-delusion, than the pragmatist who thinks he is free of ideology. Our liberal elite is full of people whose unshakeable confidence in . . . . Continue Reading »

If there is hope to be found in this painful political year, it is in the fact that the spell which liberal modernity has long cast over the Christian imagination might finally be starting to dissolve even as technocracy tightens its grip on our everyday lives. Continue Reading »

It is part of the absurdity of American life that we decide questions of truth under the guise of settling contests of rights. Which means that we decide questions of truth without thinking deeply or even very honestly about them. Thus, while it is obvious to many that we are living through a . . . . Continue Reading »

David Mills, inspired by a Facebook post from Robby George, has exhorted mostly unnamed proponents of the “Benedict Option” to reverse their various avenues of retreat and remain in the political fight. Now I can only guess the identity of the defeatists who have “left the front lines to read books in the library and argue causes and effects in the coffee shop.” But the charge puts me in mind of the colloquium discussion in the January issue of First Things which treated the debate between so-called “liberal” and “radical” Catholics, perhaps because my contribution to that discussion has elicited similar accusations of political irresponsibility or moral cowardice from people sympathetic to the liberal line of thought. Continue Reading »