Sigrid Undset understood how experiences of joy alongside unfulfilled longings can break the spell of modernity and open a window into the spiritual life. “The Wild Orchid” explores the possibility of spiritual awakening in society that has grown bored with the Christian faith and is seeking new ways to re-enchant the natural world. In Sigrid […]
As fallen human beings, we live with the threat of sin and temptation, and we can easily choose to follow these rather than Christ. Sins become the “pharaohs” in our lives—those thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions that are foreign to a life in Christ. Like the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph, these sins know not […]
Christ gave His disciples the Divine Commission to go and teach all nations, baptizing them. Christians are called to change society—all society, every society. They pursue this goal with charity and zeal, respecting the free will of individuals. Wherever Christianity has gone, its charity has transformed nations and peoples. Whenever the extreme left is in […]
“They are finally going to play my music.” —Hector Berlioz, on his deathbed Though Hector Berlioz’s operas are still little known today—even to the opera-going public, who are much more likely to find the dramas of Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, and Mozart on the program—the increasing recognition of their many glories is slowly making them less […]
Apart from Arvo Pärt, the grand old man of contemporary classical music, whose work I have admired greatly ever since I first heard Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten many years ago, Michael Kurek is the living composer whose works I especially enjoy. An American residing in Nashville, Dr. Kurek has almost single-handedly flown the flag […]
In this world darkened by the gloom of the seriously self-righteous, what is needed more than ever is the rumbustious, rollicking good humor of men and women who have seen the eternal perspective and have therefore put this world in its proper place. Before his sudden fall from the limelight last week, an interestingly entertaining […]
An artist is precisely what Flannery O’Connor thought she was. As such, she was a maker, but not a creator. As Fr. Damian Ference puts it, she was a maker of things according to right reason. And reason, as O’Connor once put it, had “lost ground among us” as of the mid-twentieth century; hence the […]
“Dred Scott” is a landmark decision because it answered questions regarding slavery that the Supreme Court had not previously addressed. It is also one of the most infamous decisions, furthering the great divide facing the nation regarding the question of slavery and moving the country further down the path toward the Civil War. Dred Scott […]
Let me begin this brief reflection with a testimonial. Culture is the motive that gives me joy from one day to the next, the reason I get up each morning. And what do I mean by culture? Let me attempt to articulate my precise understanding of this much used (and abused) term. Culture, for me, […]
Morality only “progresses” as a phenomenon of gift, in which what is good and worth doing is seen as good and worth doing by a subsequent generation, which takes on the morality of their fathers and repeats it, as their own morality. But this means that progress in morality is never assured. It may not […]
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