Author: Mark J. Chmiel

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 (#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

The Log in My Own Eye

Too conscious and calculating an awareness of all that the “scapegoat” connotes in modem usage eliminates the essential point that the persecutors believe in the guilt of their victim; they are imprisoned in the illusion…

Today’s One-Liner (#142)

For us, the Church is mater et magistra; for dissenters, she is a source of jobs, or Marty Haugen music, or chances for self-display, or political soapboxes, or hiding places, or access to important people,…

Today’s One-Liner (#141)

Marginalia are the immediate indices of the reader’s response to the text, of the dialogue between the book and himself. –George Steiner, “The Uncommon Reader” Susan Sontag, with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Today’s One-Liner (#140)

If we had more genuine religion, we would have less violence. –Rene Girard, in Conversations with Rene Girard: Prophet of Envy, edited by Cynthia L. Haven

Today’s One-Liner (#139)

Salvador de Madariaga once said that our culture should give to each man and woman, when each reaches the age of voting, a sturdy, elegant book containing an account of the death of Socrates and…