Self-un-awareness
[I]f you believe the scapegoat is guilty, you are not going to name it as being “my scapegoat.” If France scapegoats Dreyfus, no one will recognize that Dreyfus is a scapegoat. –René Girard, in Cynthia…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Today’s One-Liner (#184)
Among traditional religion’s strongest resources are precisely its ability to create and validate occasions for silence, contemplation, emptiness in the sense of cessation from activity and worldly meaning. –James Hitchcock, The Decline and Fall of…
This, But Not That
We’ve all seen self-deception of this kind on display in the reaction of Catholic educators to last Friday’s address by Pope Benedict. Having effectively divorced themselves from the Church with the 1967 Land O’ Lakes…
Today’s One-Liner (#183)
In retrospect it is easy to see what was not perceived at the time — that no conservative body with an ancient and sacred system of symbols can alter these significantly without a severe spiritual…
Today’s One-Liner (#182)
Those who keep thinking about their needs, their wants, their plans, their ideas, cannot help becoming lonely and insecure. –Eknath Easwaran, Seeing with the Eyes of Love: Reflections on a Classic of Christian Mysticism, 11
Read “The Demons”!
What would Dostoevsky say about our “multicultural” universities, our dismal sexual “liberations,” our radical feminists forcing their “all-inclusive” versions of the Bible down the throat of meekly submissive Christian churches? We do not have to…
No Other Bulwark
I’m reminded of a bold assertion, made by my Tablet colleague Liel Liebovitz, on America magazine’s Jesuitical podcast: “The [Catholic] Church is the only — the last — remaining bulwark for human dignity and freedom…
Today’s One-Liner (#181)
We too are captive: prisoners of barred rooms and closed roads, unable to see our way out of failure, our betrayals and egoisms, our fears that paralyze, our attachments that hold us frozen. –John Kavanaugh,…
Present Moment, Only Moment
We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past…
Today’s One-Liner (#180)
If you withdraw yourself from unnecessary talking and idle running about, from listening to gossip and rumors, you will find enough time that is suitable for holy meditation. –Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated…