Keep at It
If there is one thing I have learned from Mother Angelica and Father Fessio, two of the brightest stars in the Church today, it is that good ideas ought to be pursued, and then one…
Category: Commonplace book
Today’s One-Liner (#324)
The great authors, those to whom we go back again and again throughout our lives, Shakespeare and Dante, for example, are inexhaustible. –Ralph McInerny, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes,…
Today’s One-Liner (#321)
With detachment, life’s ups and downs need hardly affect our security at all. –Eknath Easwaran, Original Goodness: On the Beatitudes, 136
A Brother’s Gift
To the Jews who, in the sixties, envied the Black Power Movement; who in the nineties envied the Palestinians; who weep at Exodus but jeer at the Israel Defense Forces; who nod when Tevye praises…
Today’s One-Liner (#320)
The Jew is not only made and instructed but also commanded to live in the world and to enjoy those things that God permitted him—among the chiefest joys: that of belonging. –David Mamet, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism,…
Take Your Pick
What is the essence of Christ’s ministry? He teaches men “not to commit stupidities.” All of Tolstoy’s brutal empiricism and aristocratic impatience resound in that extraordinary answer. The Dostoevskyan Christ, on the contrary, teaches men…
The Crown of the Blessed
Moreover, if you do not steadily set your heart on Me, with a firm will to suffer everything for My sake, you will not be able to bear the heat of this battle or to…
Today’s One-Liner (#315)
Perhaps it is impossible to be unbeautiful when you’re happy. –David Grossman, Be My Knife, 11
Present Moment, Awesome Moment
Goethe once said that during eighty years of life he had known eleven happy days. I imagine that everyone, in the course of their life, must have seen many hundreds of sunrises and sunsets; they…
Two Kinds of People
Go back to Socrates: “Know thyself.” For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the…