Author: Mark J. Chmiel

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…

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…

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…