On January 29, 1959, Pope John XXIII shocked the Church and the world with his announcement at the Basilica of St. Paul outside the Walls in Rome that he was convoking the first ecumenical council […]
One my favorite books of 2015 was a new and exceptional biography of Russell Kirk, a man of letters whose many writings helped me understand, rethink, and contemplate a host of topics when I was […]
Looking back on his time in World War I—something he hated to discuss—J.R.R. Tolkien revealed that he had written some of the first parts of his massive legendarium under less-than-ideal circumstances. He had conceived The […]
In one of his informative dispatches from Rome during the Synod on the Family last fall, Robert Royal remarked with regret on the extent to which the synod fathers appeared to have taken their prescriptions […]
Early on November 2, 1963, the then President of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother, Nhu, had just heard Holy Mass at a church in a suburb of Saigon. They had fled there the […]
During Lent 1998, a teenage girl, having just left an English convent school, knelt at the grotto of St. Jerome in the Holy Land. She prayed fervently, asking that through his intercession she would one […]
“That is a good book,” wrote Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), the father of novelist Louisa May Alcott, “which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.” It’s also true, as the author of Ecclesiastes […]
Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and has spent over 80 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, is one of the most beautiful and finely-crafted novels I have […]
This year marks the 750th anniversary of the birth of the great Catholic poet Dante Alighieri. Michelangelo reverenced Dante, as did Longfellow, Dorothy Sayers, and T.S. Eliot. In fact, it was Eliot who commented, “Dante and […]
It’s been a good reading year and I highly recommend the following to the readers on your Christmas (not “holiday”) shopping list: God or Nothing, by Cardinal Robert Sarah (Ignatius Press): It was the book […]
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