The Faith
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St. Edith Stein 6 I treasure the Palm Sunday liturgy for the opportunity it gives me to demand that Jesus be crucified. (For any non-Catholics reading this, the traditional Palm Sunday liturgy involves a lengthy reading of the Passion narrative in which the congregation speaks the words of the mob.) Presumably we all like to…
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St. Edith Stein 5 “When a person lacking faith reads Holy Scripture—for example for the purposes of philology or religious studies—he does not come to know God. he only learns how God is conceived in the Bible and by those who accept the Bible in faith…” Here is the story of what has gone wrong…
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St. Edith Stein 4 It’s the Fourth Sunday of Lent (“Laetare Sunday,” which has a bad way of turning in my mind into “Laertes Sunday”). I haven’t read nearly as much of my saint as I had planned, which is not surprising. But in my defense I can say that the amount of reflection provoked…
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St. Edith Stein 3 …we form words for the purpose of setting an image graphically before our eyes and doing it in such a way that it points beyond itself to what the words are meant to express mediately and what the images are meant to represent. (This and other quotations are from “Ways to…
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St. Edith Stein 2 Because Lent is a time for reflection, events naturally seem to line up so as to prevent one from doing much reflecting. This past week I made no more than a start at reading Edith Stein’s “Ways to Know God,” a somewhat lengthy essay in explication of the teachings of Dionysius…
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Edith Stein 1 For some time now I’ve been wanting to study the writings of St. Edith Stein, or, as she is formally known, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. I prefer to think of her as Edith Stein; it makes her seem no less holy, and closer to our earthly life, and, specifically, closer…
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The Social Justice Challenge One of the unhappy effects of the attack from within the Church itself on Catholic doctrine is a tendency for the orthodox to be almost as much occupied with preserving the faith as with practicing it. I think it is becoming possible for us to move past this, now that the…
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Thanksgiving Morning The street in front of my house is unpaved. It used to be an ordinary gravel road, but a few years ago the city came in and covered it with some sort of dark gritty stuff that looks and feels like it could be old pavement ground to bits. It’s coarser than sand…
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Ending Up Twenty to thirty years ago the first wave of young orthodox Catholics formed not only by Vatican II but in reaction to the errors that followed upon it, formed perhaps above all by the exciting early days of the papacy of John Paul II, began marrying and raising families. Many of them were…
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Hitchens, Franklin, and Our Sundered America I read Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography in high school. At least I think I did. I’m sure I must have read at least some of it, because otherwise how would I have such a vivid memory of disliking it? The doubt comes from the fact that I remember nothing specific…
Light On Dark Water 