The Catholic Thing

By Brad MinerIn 2019, I wrote here that, "When I was a 4-year-old, I sat on the fire escape of our apartment and thought: 'What if there were nothing?' (But I'm sure, back then, I didn't use the subjunctive.) And then thought: 'I'm here.' I stared into the slate-gray sky and knew or sensed that 'nothing' is the one thing that cannot be."It was that slate-gray sky, of course. I don't suppose I've...

By Michael PakalukI read Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's So Ordered: An Originalist's View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country backwards, chapter-wise, and I'd recommend you do the same. The end of the book tells us about Samuel Alito, the great-hearted man and patriot, while the beginning of the book, academically more respectable, to be sure, dives right into the state of the...

By Francis X. MaierReaders with a taste for history may remember the story of Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02). For those who don't, it was a high-end military simulation from a couple of decades ago, run by the now defunct U.S. Joint Forces Command. Described as "the key to military transformation," it cost about $250 million – a huge expense for such a thing at the time. The game's premise was...

By Steven Jonathan RummelsburgFew criticisms of modern education have aged as well as C.S. Lewis's 1943 The Abolition of Man. In "Men without Chests," Lewis explains, "we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. . . .We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." The chest, in this context, is the trained heart that...

By Robert RoyalToday is the Feast of the North American Martyrs, a group of French Jesuits and religious – Jean de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, Jean de Lalande, Antoine Daniel, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, Noêl Chabanel, and Br. René Goupil. It's worth recalling each of them by name as a reminder that they were individuals like us (though holier and more heroic), not merely some distant...

By John M. GrondelskiThis Sunday's Gospel showcases one of those teachings people can always quote and think they understand what Jesus meant – until you talk to them about it: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." (Matthew 22:21)The context of Jesus's teaching was, of course, attempted entrapment: the Pharisees were seeking a "gotcha" moment...

By Mary EberstadtCornell University is my alma mater. I spent four years there in a scholarship house known widely as a redoubt of nerds. As it happened, Telluride House had as its neighbor one of the most raucous fraternities on campus – a juxtaposition not without occasional levity, including when the brothers banded together outdoors and chanted, "Hey Telluride! E equals mc squared!" in our...

By David G Bonagura, Jr.We have come to an incredible cultural moment. The seemingly unstoppable drumbeat for unlimited progress that has long characterized Modernity has lost its rhythm. Technological advancement and social engineering have not delivered the promised yet still elusive "good life." Instead, rapid change without a compass has generated widespread dissatisfaction, distress, and...

By Stephen P. WhiteThe death of Pope Paul VI on August 6, 1978 – the Feast of the Transfiguration – was not a great surprise. The pope had been in poor and declining health for some time. He had retreated to the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo a month before and had been bedridden for several days when he suffered a massive heart attack.Twenty days later, the Patriarch of Venice,...

By Brad MinerOn December 3rd, Nidal Mailk Hasan will be executed by a firing squad. This will take place at the site of his crimes, the Ft. Hood U.S. Army base near Killeen, Texas, where, on November 5, 2009, Hasan, an Army doctor, fatally murdered 13 people and injured more than 30 others. There is no doubt about his guilt.From death row, he wrote to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi asking to be...