The desire to atone. The misplaced way to do it. It’s why there are mobs. It’s what Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery is based on: we know, from the image of God inside us, that something is wrong and it must be atoned. But how? Continue reading A Season of Lent: Rejected and Condemned
It is the glory of this fiat of Mary allowing God to be made flesh that withstands all blasphemy in order to triumph every time in every circumstance. Continue reading A Season of Lent: Saying Yes To God’s Will
He makes a curious distinction: to love an enemy is to want his highest good, treating him with the courtesy and respect we would want while not claiming him as a close associate. We don’t do as our enemy does, we act better toward him. Continue reading A Season of Lent: Loving Our Enemies
O God of earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry.
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die; Continue reading A Season of Lent: On Prayer
The children were partly dissatisfied with it because it did not end with a Day of Judgment; because it was never revealed to the hero and heroine that the dog had been faithful and the cat faithless. Continue reading A Season of Lent: On Mercy
As her prayer ends, Esther recognizes a strength that Chesterton writes about that identifies the Christian from the Unbeliever: “Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian…joy is central and sorrow is peripheral” (Chesterton, Orthodoxy). Continue reading A Season of Lent: Sorrow to Wholeness
Today’s Lenten reflection is a difficult one but also an encouraging thought. Chesterton confronts us all about what defines Christianity. He does so by highlighting what Christ Himself has warned us: that Christianity is difficult, that grace as its dilute meaning has come to be understood in our day, is missing the entire point James is making about faith and works. Continue reading A Season of Lent: Giving God Our Best
Indeed they daily create more fear and promise one thing about help with their words but reality is showing average citizens all of this to be a lie. This is what happens when people put their trust in human beings to save them. Continue reading A Season of Lent: Trusting in Men and Riches
“Chesterton changed his mind. He admitted he was a fool and a joke. He had professed all the latest ideas. But the one thing he was sure was most wrong, ended up being right ” – Kevin De Young. This is how Chesterton’s great work, “Orthodoxy” begins: with a repentance, a change of his mind. Continue reading A Season of Lent: Changing Our Mind
Every worshipper of God, God means to become a saint. And when we preach the entirety of the Good News to those in the world, in its basic sense, we are its prophets. Continue reading A Season of Lent: Prophets, Saints, and the World
Humility is the mother of giants. Continue reading A Season of Lent : On Humility
As we begin Lent by focusing on the essentials of fasting and almsgiving, may we also work towards repentance and live the holy lives for Christ He has called us to live… Continue reading A Season of Lent: On Repentance
In their talk about Thomas Becket and such saints and heroes they make soap more important than soul; they reject godliness whenever it is not cleanliness. Continue reading A Season of Lent: Almsgiving
He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. Continue reading A Season of Lent: Fasting
Strangely or not, St. Valentine’s Day, the day we think about love and pleasant feelings also began in the death of this saint – for marrying Christians! Continue reading LOVE , MARRIAGE, AND DEATH
Lincoln’s Birthday “It is recognized that Lincoln emerged from the lower grades of law and politics through an atmosphere in … Continue reading FAILURES WHO SUCCEED
“The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.” – G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Continue reading MIRACLES!
“Going mad is the slowest and dullest business in the world. I have very nearly done it more than once in my boyhood, and so have nearly all my friends, born under the general doom of mortals, but especially of moderns; I mean the doom that makes a man come almost to the end of thinking before he comes to the first chance of living. Continue reading THE MAD OFFICIAL
Candlemas was an especially important day to G. K. Chesterton. He marked it by writing an entire volume of poems titled The Queen of the Seven Swords. In it he makes specific reference to the day in his poem, The Paradox Continue reading CANDLEMAS!
Chesterton mentioned a number of saints in his writings but he wrote only two books featuring saints, one of which was Thomas. We feature many of Chesterton’s observations on St. Thomas today in a feast of quotes! Continue reading DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH
After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white. Continue reading CONVERSION!
the whole failure of Socialism and its lust to control our thinking and our way of living in freedom. It does not really seek to help as much as it seeks to dominate: “They never give anything—except orders” Continue reading THEY NEVER GIVE ANYTHING – EXCEPT ORDERS
deny that deadly knowledge that you think you know. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh … Continue reading THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS
But all true delusions have in them this unalterable assertion—that what is not is. The difference between us and the maniac is not about how things look or how things ought to look, but about what they self-evidently are Continue reading THE MODERN EVIL
…that modern emancipation has really been a new persecution of the Common Man. If it has emancipated anybody, it has in rather special and narrow ways emancipated the Uncommon Man. Continue reading MODERN EMANCIPATION IS THE NEW PERSECUTION
Pray for our country. Pray for those who have protected us who are now under attack. Ora Pro Nobis. Continue reading St. Joseph: Ora Pro Nobis
“It was in the season of Christmas that I came out of my little garden in that “field of the beeches” between the Chilterns and the Thames, and began to walk backwards through history to the place from which Christmas came. Continue reading THEOPHANY!
why we are seeing the uptick in so many betrayals We used to be satisfied at making a decent living, … Continue reading GOOD MONEY
this is also a journey that paradoxically has an end in our Feast Day, but never comes to an end for each Christian in their faith journey. It is a satisfying mystery within the Great Mystery of the Church! Continue reading EPIPHANY! (traditional)
the beautiful poetry is somehow or other left out… Continue reading JOURNEY TO EPIPHANY CONTINUES
Chesterton reminds us in his poem about the wise men’s journey , something startling is needed for an epiphany that leads to a revelation and a repentance that is lasting Continue reading JOURNEY TO EPIPHANY
For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child. Continue reading THE EPIPHANY OF THE LORD
The most holy name of Jesus is the mystery of the divine personality. And during Christmas, we are brought to this realization in all the Christmas controversies. Continue reading THE MOST HOLY NAME OF JESUS
Christians today owe a great deal to these two bishops and doctors of the Church. And during Christmas we remember them with their own day. They stood firm in the face of bodily threat for the truth. Continue reading MEMORIAL OF STS. BASIL AND GREGORY
Do you want to feel the same heart-pounding excitement? Do you want to feel new in this new year? Then you and I must allow God to help us recapture what it is like to be a child who retains wonder at the astounding Good News He has given to us! Continue reading SOLEMNITY OF MARY, MOTHER OF GOD
Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Continue reading HAPPY NEW YEAR!
The first “peace-time” pope in the reign of Constantine, St. Sylvester took part in two very important negotiations: the Arian heresy and the Council of Nicaea. Continue reading FEAST OF ST SYLVESTER
But the great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why. Continue reading DISCOVERING CHRISTMAS
what this Saint of the Church did on its altar by accepting a martyr’s death at prayer gave strength to successive generations to stand in obedience to Peter’s words. A riddle for history, indeed! Continue reading FEAST DAY OF ST THOMAS BECKET
Chesterton wrote about Herod and his atrocity upon the children of Bethlehem from two vantages: First, in a biting satirical way, where his pen was used as sword, both as artist and writer, and then again, 5 years later, with deep mourning in his masterpiece, The Everlasting Man. Continue reading Because his crime is tragic, his punishment is comic…
That is the paradox of love. If we love God first, we are then able to love others best. Then we are holy and our families can be a holy family as the Holy Family was and is holy. Continue reading FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY
We can dream of white Christmases as well as a world finally at peace. We don’t have to understand everything to believe and trust God that such things that are beyond our control are possible. And most importantly, it is He who brings them about and not we ourselves. Continue reading ST.JOHN’S DAY
Stephen’s witness was so powerful, that Chesterton, years later, makes mention of what he did by the name of the place he saw from the window of his hotel in Ireland, recalling to mind Jesus’ own testimony about the power of witnessing for the Church: Continue reading ST.STEPHEN’S DAY
“The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.” Continue reading CHRISTUS NATUS EST!
We need not wander more but enter with our gift;
Our gift of finest gold,
Gold that was never bought nor sold; Continue reading WE NEED NOT WANDER MORE
the god in the cave Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet. – G. K. Chesterton It hardly seems … Continue reading THE HANDS THAT HAD MADE THE SUN AND STARS
If we, like the angels, received nothing personal from it, but were bystanders looking on with hearts swelling, learn to sing together in what Chesterton calls “the primeval duty of Praise” we will know then that we are at last what God meant for us to be – Sons of God. Continue reading THE GREATEST OF ALL REVOLUTIONS
This Advent at no time more than at the present highlights that traditions, both scriptural and of heritage are under attack. Its two opposing visions in conflict, like two worlds colliding with each other. Chesterton saw the beginnings of what is happening in our day. Continue reading WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
The paradoxes of the Bible are a wonderous, beauteous and astounding collection of the truth. And one of the most intriguing is what Chesterton calls “the paradoxes in favor of peace.” Continue reading Advent: Paradoxes in favour of peace…
“While Chesterton was seen as a generally happy man, some scholarship indicates that he may have battled a depressive mood now and again. Certainly he wrote about the afflictions of his mind while a young man,.. Continue reading A PRAYER IN DARKNESS
