As I knelt to pray my rosary before the Blessed Sacrament, I was struck by the astonishing confidence required to build Sacré-Cœur. In 1789, France, the Church’s eldest daughter, declared herself no longer a disciple of Jesus Christ but an apostate.
The life of the mind is fundamentally dangerous when divorced from the world. Indeed, intellectuals have a moral duty to seek out ways of encountering reality—the thing out there—if they are to avoid becoming a tremendous nuisance to others, a trait so common among their kind.
I have dedicated much of my life to studying the great philosophers and scholars of our civilisation, but from none have I learned as much about true human flourishing as I have from the peasant girl of Nettuno.
As the Season has drawn to a close, I have been reflecting on the meaning of hunting. Some hunts this Season have transported me into a timeless experience into which, no doubt, many hunting people have been taken.
The Ordinariate is a fine example of realising Newman’s foundational conservative principle, namely that “of uniting what is free in the new structure of society with what is authoritative in the old, without any base compromise with ‘Progress’ and ‘Liberalism.'”
The most terrible thing about a culture that treats children as if they are the most important people is that the children are not only unlikeable, but they are unhappy.
We need stories. It is not enough to have a conception of virtue; we need to witness a virtuous person. It is not enough to know truths; we need truths embodied, for embodied are we.
For all his faults, we need Cobbett today, or at least something of his fighting spirit, because he really did love the little guy.
Whilst escape from the city for the sake of prayer and meditation is a recurring motif of Western literature, and one that plays an important role in the life of Jesus Christ, one of the great achievements of our civilisation has been that of sanctifying the city.
Senior clergy persistently talk about the primacy of ‘pastoral care,’ implicitly presenting themselves as exemplars. Now they refuse to extend such care to those who want nothing more than to worship God as did their forefathers in the Faith.
I do not like revolutions in any case, but I especially dislike the proposals of the Davos Jacobins.
My ‘microaggression’ was met with what might be deemed a ‘macroaggression.’ Whereas I was seeking no confrontation and sought not to make her or anyone else feel uncomfortable, she confronted me directly, specifically to make me feel uncomfortable—and she succeeded.
