Author: Mark J. Chmiel

Right Focus

You will never be devout of heart unless you are thus silent about the affairs of others and pay particular attention to yourself. If you attend wholly to God and yourself, you will be little…

Today’s One-Liner (#284)

With this book, he came out of the intellectually unfashionable Christian closet. –Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard’s book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, in her Evolution of Desire: A Life of…

Choose

We must decide whether our top priority is to smite the wicked or to advance the less fortunate, whether we are looking for visions and rhetoric that make us feel good for the moment or…

Plenty of Time

Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people….

Today’s One-Liner (#283)

[As a student, Howard] Thurman did this by, among other things, reading quite literally every book on the shelves of Morehouse’s admittedly modest library, most of the religious texts donated by retired white ministers.  –Sohrab…

Readiness Is All

Every time I re-read a book of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas, I shake my head and wonder why I had not seen that before. The answer is most likely that I was not ready…

Outright Joy

For the “romance” of Clare and Francis has always exuded a warmth and a brightness that cannot be accounted for by the actual events. I believe the source of that fire is partly our own…

Today’s One-Liner (#281)

Within the Christian tradition more than a suspicion exists that the more intelligent we are,  the more we consider ourselves to be “intellectuals,” the more difficult it is to save our souls.  –James V. Schall,…