Expanding the Circle
When we live narrowly unto ourselves, we have only one person working for us. When we are habitually thoughtful of others, a great many people are working and pulling for us. –David Dunn, Try Giving…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Today’s One-Liner (#294)
The Church’s claim is that we reach our fulfillment as human beings not by asserting ourselves, but by giving ourselves—by making ourselves into the gift to others that life itself is to us. –George Weigel,…
Epigraphs
One use of his commonplaces was to supply mottoes for his own and others’ periodical essays. Johnson’s adeptness in providing epigraphs suggests something about how he read and filed away crystals of literature that…
Today’s One-Liner (#293)
This is that conquest of the world and of ourselves, which has been always considered as the perfection of human nature; and this is only to be obtained by fervent prayer, steady resolution, and frequent…
Today’s One-Liner (#292)
The four cardinal natural virtues are fertilizer for the spiritual soil in which the three theological virtues are to grow. –Peter Kreeft, Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from Saint Thomas Aquinas, 113
First Things First
Let us look at our own shortcomings and leave other people’s alone; for those who live carefully ordered lives are apt to be shocked at everything and we might well learn very important lessons from…
Just Taking Care of the Kulaks
“All these words had their effect on me too. I was only a girl—and during meetings and special briefings, from films, books, articles, and radio broadcasts, from Stalin himself, I kept hearing one and the…
Today’s One-Liner (#291)
In the West, too, appeared The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental three-volume exposé of the Soviet slave-labor system which single-handedly destroyed what remained of Western illusions about the great Communist experiment. –Joseph Epstein, Life Sentences: Literary…
An Exchange on America
The following arrived in my in-box today as I am a subscriber to journalist Matt Taibbi‘s Substack. Monty Python’s “What Have the Romans… Reader Paul E.–Are you a card-carrying Exceptionalist, Matt, that you believe this…
Today’s One-Liner (#290)
It is a comfort to me, that at last, in my sixty-third year, I have attained to know, even thus hastily, confusedly, and imperfectly, what my Bible contains. –Samuel Johnson, cited in Fiona MacMath, The…