Look Within
I find [René Girard’s] ideas have enormous explanatory power not only for the world we see around us – but the world we find within us. People may question his reading of archaic societies or…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Today’s One-Liner (#147)
Patience attains the goal. –Saint Teresa of Ávila, quoted in Eknath Easwaran, God Makes the Rivers to Flow: Passages for Meditation, 1982
Good News
The meaning of order is there, but it is precisely its presence that determines the vestigial character of the treatment of it. The reason lies in the fact that the violence of the cultural order…
Today’s One-Liner (#146)
Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. –The Elder Zosima, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The Way of Microscopic Actions
I applied myself to practicing little virtues, not having the capability of practicing the great. For instance, I loved to fold up the mantles forgotten by the Sisters, and to render them all sorts of…
Today’s One-Liner (#145)
Music is my ecstasy. –Glenn Gould, quoted in Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould
A Jesuit’s Advice
Part of the trouble is that so few who walked out landed anywhere. Frying pan to fire; they left the church and the culture swallowed them whole. It seems better, as a rule, to hang…
The Old and the Young
There was something peculiarly wounding in the New Left attacks on older liberals and radicals. I felt that some of its spokesmen wanted not just to refute my opinions – that would have been entirely…
Today’s One-Liner (#144)
“Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?” –The Gospel of Luke 24:32
Today’s One-Liner (#143)
Rigid reactionaries and rigid innovators…have constantly fed on each other, each serving as a bogey which gives the other a certain credibility. –James Hitchcock, The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, 1972