After reading Douglas Farrow’s “The Secret of the Saeculum” (May), I found myself unsure of how to understand it. Take, for instance, the following striking passage: Our age is a very definite age, a very well-defined age, precisely because it is bracketed by the first and second comings of . . . . Continue Reading »
Hagia Sophia should no more be a mosque than the Parthenon should be restored to the worship of Athena. Continue Reading »
Without quite meaning to, most Western countries have acquired large and growing numbers of Muslim minorities. The idea has slowly sunk in not only that Muslims are here to stay, but also that they remain committed to their faith. For many Muslims, this entails hostility to a Western culture still . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1187, Pope Urban III received news so startling that he died from hearing it. Across the Mediterranean, in the Crusader-controlled Kingdom of Jerusalem, a great battle had been fought between Christian knights and the forces of the Muslim leader, Saladin. On a rocky plain formed by an extinct . . . . Continue Reading »
Prayer is, most fundamentally, a matter of heeding a call and showing up. Continue Reading »
The rise of Islamist terrorism has made once-fringe conservative parties stress their Christian identity. Continue Reading »
Sir Roger was a constant gadfly cajoling us back to sanity. Continue Reading »
Pseudo-liberalism seeks to turn upside-down the value system of the civilization that once was Christendom. Continue Reading »
I grew up in northern Italy, in a Catholic household. For us, as for many Italian families, being Catholic was a matter of tradition rather than of faith. When I was young, I attended catechism in Milan, received my sacraments, and believed in God. But my parents did not teach me to practice a . . . . Continue Reading »
Immigration Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, which was lately set forth in Matthew Schmitz’s “Immigration Idealism” (May), famously relegates Jesus’s social teaching to the realm of the ideal rather than the possible. Schmitz’s endorsement of this realism makes a mistake that . . . . Continue Reading »
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