If you have young children (I don’t), or were once a young child yourself (I wasn’t), you’re probably familiar with children’s Christmas frenzy. It’s all about the presents. (Well, maybe a little about the decorations.) The religious aspects of the holiday are virtually impossible to communicate to them. The origin of the gift-giving tradition …
Category: Christianity
Dec 08 2021
The Speculations Of Unbelievers
Many persons who lack faith claim to be disturbed by those of us who have it. In some cases, this is because the unbeliever fails to understand the nature of a religious faith. In others, the unbeliever misunderstands or misconstrues an important characteristic of religious faith: inasmuch as it is unprovable by its nature, …
Dec 05 2021
Images Of Perfection
Good morning, Gentle Reader. Yes, I “took yesterday off.” After a fashion, anyway. I spent it finishing the first draft of my novel-under-construction, which is now in the hands of my test readers. And with that elephant off my back, I feel years…well, maybe a month or two younger. So I’m back at my …
Nov 23 2021
A Walking Corpse
This piece will be rather brutal, I fear. I have some ugly ground to cover, and it’s not easily compressed into a thousand exquisitely appropriate and entirely non-vulgar words. Someone once posited that the way to structure an exposition is to lead off by telling your audience what you will tell them. You …
Nov 21 2021
For The Feast Of Christ The King
[Today is the Feast of Christ The King, which falls on the last Sunday before Advent. It’s a unique holy day for several reasons, and one that I find particularly personally significant. The essay below first appeared at Eternity Road on January 6, 2008. I find that I cannot improve upon it, for which …
Nov 10 2021
Which Is To Be Master? (UPDATED)
My most recent novel, In Vino, provides the culmination of several themes threaded through the Onteora Canon. One of the most important of them is expressed compactly in this passage: [Ray] glanced around the table. All the glasses were empty. No cheese and only a few crackers remained on the tray he’d prepared. …
Oct 31 2021
Concerning Hallowe’en And Related Things
The costuming, the candy, and the partying all to the side, Hallowe’en – the night before All Saints Day – is actually a Christian event of some antiquity. It and All Saints Day (November 1) itself arose as counterweights to the pagan festival of Samhain, which also occurs on these two days. The …
Sep 15 2021
From The “No, Really?” Dept.
There are days I marvel at the obdurate ignorance of self-nominated “scientists.” As I was one, once, I think I can say this with authority: if it isn’t in his wheelhouse, the typical scientist will dismiss it as irrelevant at best, absurd at worst. Mankind has developed a great variety of approaches to …
Jul 25 2021
Gifts, Love, And Miracles
Today’s Mass reading from the Gospel of St. John told of the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes: After these things Jesus went over the sea of Galilee, which is the sea of Tiberias. And a great multitude followed him, because they saw his miracles which he did on them that were diseased. …
Jul 22 2021
Something Catholic And Beautiful
If you haven’t yet made the acquaintance of Loreena McKennitt, it’s high time. Listen to what she does with the stanzas from Saint John of the Cross’s classic tome Dark Night of the Soul: Upon a darkened night The flame of love was burning in my breast And by a lantern bright I fled …
Jul 08 2021
The Petty And Mealymouthed We Will Always Have With Us
First, please read this article: Hobby Lobby is embroiled in another controversy after running a full-page advertisement in numerous newspapers throughout the United States on July 4 that appeared to advocate for a Christian-run government. The arts and crafts giant’s ad, which ran in newspapers on Independence Day included the Bible verse …
Jul 08 2021
The “1000 Words” Edition
There are days when a single graphic expresses my sentiments better than any essay I could write. Here’s one, courtesy of our favorite Bookworm: Militant anti-theists tend to preen themselves as brighter than believers. Yet all their arguments are patterned after the “argument” in Bookworm’s graphic. There’s a moral in there, somewhere. …
Jun 29 2021
An Inherently Un-Titleable Piece
Full Disclosure: There are people who think I’m crazy. They’re not a majority…yet. But I would be remiss were I not to mention their existence. “But why?” I hear you ask. Well, mostly because I’m a libertarian-conservative Catholic patriot, with emphasis on Catholic. “How,” they ask, “could anyone so devoted to freedom simultaneously embrace …
Jun 25 2021
Lost…And Found
[The following essay first appeared at the old Liberty’s Torch site on September 22, 2014. Consider it a companion piece to the Everything Put Together essay – FWP] *** James Pinkerton has a seven-year-old essay at The American Conservative that I blush to have overlooked before this: In one of the great epics …
Jun 13 2021
Christian Courage
This has already been a “big day” for me. I’m just back from Mass, which I attended in person for the first time in a year. I wasn’t absent from the pews out of fear, or laziness, but because my parish was enforcing a mask rule and was not distributing the Eucharist. But the …
Jun 06 2021
Corpus Christi
Today is Corpus Christi Sunday, the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. It’s a day most significant to me, for reasons I delineated in this baseline essay. If you haven’t read it before this, I urge it upon you. And please, reflect upon the goodness of a God who, in contrast to …
May 23 2021
A Call To Action
And when the days of the Pentecost were accomplished, they were all together in one place: And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them parted tongues as it were of fire, and it …
May 21 2021
Professionalization Versus Vocation
I’ve been in something of a state recently: a creeping sense of desperation, a desire to reject the evidence of my senses that’s almost strong enough to overwhelm my reason. Perhaps the best short characterization of that state is “Make it all go away!” Nevertheless, I remain committed to reality, and to the best, …
May 02 2021
Three Lives, Three Deaths
She was young. Far too young, by most reckonings, to be equipped to cope with tragedy. She’d been married only a short time when she discovered that she was pregnant…and only a short time later discovered that her baby daughter was anencephalic, incapable of living outside the womb. Against medical advice and …
Apr 28 2021
Faith And Fiction: A Rumination
The more you look, the more you see. — Robert M. Pirsig It’s amazing the way the realm of the mind expands, providing ever more room to prowl, and hopefully to grow, to him who is willing to look at significant subjects synthetically as well as analytically. Consider this observation from the great …
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