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Nourishing Mystery

This book, by the late Jesuit theologian Xavier Tilliette, discusses how philosophers from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries—including Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Fichte, and Hegel, as well as a number of minor figures—engaged with the doctrine of the Eucharist. It needs to . . . . Continue Reading »

Everyday Freedom

Something is wrong. Throughout the West, people are angry, anxious, and discontented. Paradoxically, the ill temper arises amid wealth unimaginable to our recent ancestors. (But perhaps this is not a paradox after all. Recall 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”) . . . . Continue Reading »

Normophobia

We’re all familiar with the policy debates that surround the family. How does the tax code interact with family stability and the needs of children? Who should care for children, and how is this care to be supported? What are the ethical implications of fertility technology? But behind all these . . . . Continue Reading »

Late April Snow Storm

The land is all alight with Easter colors,Tulips in pink and orange bending overThe clumps of daffodils just past first flowering.Even the tips of lilacs, rough and brittle,Begin to round themselves with pregnant green.But all this sinks, today, beneath new weightAs sudden blooms of white descend in . . . . Continue Reading »

An Easter Celebration

And so, we’ve come to this,a new beginning in an end,and celebrate the way we didjust days ago, gathered closein that small room, what wedid not then know—that He would go, but come again,this morning, when we’d lostalmost all hope. We’d bowedour heads, confessed to sin,determined to go . . . . Continue Reading »

Abundance

Clear water on a Catskill stream spills,flowing down a smooth rock faceinto a pool shaped like a cup held withinhigh rounded walls. A Chinese painting,think of that, fine brush strokes formingfissured cracks from which green fernsunfurl lace while light falls featheredthrough new leaves as I stand, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Ends of the Earth

The wind shears through hardwoods,       then rain brings down the leaves      here, eight thousand miles east oftheir archipelago of service,     maplike now in its remoteness. Woodsmoke censes the air in the hermitage       they . . . . Continue Reading »

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