Archive

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and...

It is often said that we live two lives, one at home and one at work. People speak—rather unfortunately—of “work spouses,” for example. On the average workday, we spend...

My first brush with the Society of Jesus was not a positive one. I was in eighth grade, my first year in a Catholic school. One of the parish’s...

In an age when every piece of writing shared on the internet requires a visual image, generic stock photography comes in handy. When one reads articles online about the...

It is summer, and vacation is on our minds—either memories of vacations past, or plans for vacations coming up before Labor Day and a return to normalcy. This year,...

Several years ago, when one of our sons was in high school and had been on Facebook for only a short while, my wife was surprised by the number...

Like Twain, Gandhi, and Einstein, Chesterton is misquoted almost as often as he is quoted accurately. One of my favorites is the statement that once people stop believing in...

When I was young, I had a recurring dream. I’d be walking home from grade school—it was a walk of only a few blocks—and I’d pass the house that...

With some regularity since California joined the union in 1850, efforts have been made to split the state. Thanks to governmental and bureaucratic inertia, big ideas don’t often move...

The other day, I sat down to write a letter to our college-age daughter, who is spending a semester abroad. Years ago, it would have been far easier. My...

Sometimes, older works of literature provide a good starting point for reflections that strike at the root of current events. These classics show that there is nothing new under...

A fairly popular contemporary view of the apocalypse envisions it as a sudden and complete shutdown of electrical power. Think of S. M. Stirling’s series of science fiction books,...

The rise of film and television in the first half of the twentieth century led several of the era’s major writers to fear for the future of the book....

There is a saying, variously attributed, that journalism is the first rough draft of history. There is some truth to this, even in an age when much of what...

Recent announcements out of two Catholic colleges appear to provide both good news and bad news about the state of Catholic higher education. But even in the bad news,...