Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard is a story “of the decline and fall of the house of Salina” (the New York Times) and “the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy” (the New York Review of Books), a “dirge for an aristocratic world in steep descent (the Wall Street Journal). True enough, if too modest. Lampedusa’s novel is an attempt to reckon with the fact that we taste eternity in mutable forms. Wild loves are pollarded by time, childhood homes are lost or destroyed, pets die. Continue Reading »
Your Holiness:I recall with pleasure and gratitude my visit to the Vatican in November and your moving address to our Colloquium on the Complementarity of Man and Woman in Marriage. There, gathered with leaders of the world’s great religious traditions, East and West, you reaffirmed the Church’s . . . . Continue Reading »
While procrastinating from surely more pressing projects, I decided to alphabetize my books. I have many books, too many, including not a few volumes I'll likely never read, but I've never felt that I've had a “library.” That's the sort of thing that I imagine requiring a great mansion built by . . . . Continue Reading »
Yesterday I had the good pleasure to join a courageous group of people for a conference entitled “Transformation Potential” held at the Emmanuel Centre in London. The conference was spearheaded by Michael Davidson, a man of God who came out of the homosexual life many years ago and heads up a . . . . Continue Reading »
One of the first modes of critical thinking is knowing what others think and say. If we’re to be conscientious citizens in a free republic, we must follow the other side’s arguments and evidence, admitting those points that identify weaknesses in our own position. Continue Reading »
