Author: Mark J. Chmiel

The Hourly Battle

With every vice, virtue becomes more difficult, but still possible. With every virtue, additional virtue becomes less difficult, but vice is always still possible. Life is spiritual warfare, and both sides are very much alive….

Today’s One-Liner (#256)

“My daughter, ask for nothing other than the cross, and that, in fact, without consolation; for that is perfection.” –Saint John of the Cross to María Machuca, cited in Edith Stein, The Science of the…

Change Is Possible

Therefore whenever you see evil, look for the good behind it, the good that it is perverting. When you see a parasite, look for its host. When God saw the hate-filled persecutor of Christians, Saul…

Today’s One-Liner (#254)

Sin consists in the loss of order in the soul, just as sickness consists in disorder of the body. ––Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Josef Pieper, The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas, #299

You Say You Want a Revolution?

My brother Evgeni Yakovlevich used to say that the decisive part in the subjugation of the intelligentsia was played not by terror and bribery (though, God knows, there was enough of both), but by the…

Today’s One-Liner (#253)

While he was eating in restaurants and walking freely through the streets of New York, and while his estranged son was growing up in the relative safety of Palestine, Bashevis’s fellow Polish Jews were facing…

The Grace of Sympathy

When I turned, I found that the young man had taken out the dog and was standing at the door looking in upon us with dry eyes, but quiet. The girl was quiet too and…

Seeking the Wise

In a touching essay, Professor Ralph McInerny recalled listening as a young man to the last lecture the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain gave one autumn night in 1958 at the Moreau Seminary on the…