One of the most remarkable features of our society is its blithe dismissal of tradition. Religious practices that have long shaped our social and political life are held in contempt. Time-tested convictions that guided generations before us are not just second-guessed but mocked and denounced. It is . . . . Continue Reading »
The great liberal thinkers who devised our constitutional order were responding to a seventeenth-century problem, most sharply diagnosed by Thomas Hobbes. The English, Hobbes said, were “seeing double”—divided, both personally and politically, by conflicting allegiances to Christ and King. . . . . Continue Reading »
The slow time of Covidtide could be a blessing in disguise.
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Modern Western culture has tried to domesticate and marginalize death. But death is inevitable. Continue Reading »
Let those who constantly rail against Pope Francis without listening to his words finally listen. Continue Reading »
Unless we reconfigure our lives to understand and act on it, the “new evangelization” will remain just another pious slogan. 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 »
In the last fifty years, most writing about modern Catholicism has treated Vatican II as the great watershed. According to the standard narrative, the Church before the Council was wedded to a stultifying scholasticism and sunk in soul-crushing authoritarianism. After the Council, a new spirit . . . . Continue Reading »
In The Irony of Modern Catholic History, George Weigel offers a comprehensive interpretation of the history of the Catholic Church’s encounter with modernity. For Weigel, the fixed point in this story is the goodness of the aspirations of “political modernity,” by which he generally means . . . . Continue Reading »
Synod-2019 cast in sharp relief the grave doctrinal and theological issues facing the Church. Continue Reading »
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