Today’s One-Liner (#150)
By the first quarter of the twenty-first century, what is driving many Western converts into the Church is not resistance to Catholic teaching, but desired fidelity to it. –Mary Eberstadt, 1968 IS SO OVER
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Life in the United States of Amnesia
So we plod along, more or less in the dark, more or less humiliated by the dreary quality of our prayer, our worship by turns inane and trivial, our sense of the holy vitiated, distracted,…
A Mission
After the Holocaust, no further doubt was possible. Isaac said so explicitly: the work he wanted to fashion would also be a surviving testimony to a murdered people, a vanished culture, and a dying language. …
Today’s One-Liner (#149)
What does a Chinese typewriter look like? –Wisława Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces, 44
Today’s One-Liner (#148)
In Poor Folk we have the first timid and hesitant expression of the great theme of theodicy, the questioning of the wisdom of the world created by God—thus a questioning of God himself—that will ultimately…
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…
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…