ISIS and the Enigma of Modernity

The BBC has just reported yet another story of a young woman from a dysfunctional home situation in Britain heading off to Syria for the hope of a better life with ISIS.…

Thomism and Architecture

In Philip Bess’ work Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred, he uses a Thomistic-Aristotelian framework (including but not limited to what he calls “my happy participation in and…

The Role of Beauty, Joy and Love in Parenting

Throughout my career as a freelance author, there have been certain themes I keep returning to. One of these themes is the necessity for parents to demonstrate to their children that Christianity…

Beauty and Christian Nurture

From my book Saints and Scoundrels, page 14: “…the greatest defense against evil is to enjoy the good…the strongest bulwark against unbelief is our capacity to love what is beautiful…the surest support…

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My Pilgrimage Towards Gratefulness

How can I be happy when everything in my life is going wrong? How can I be content when I don’t have everything I want? Those were some of the questions I…

V-Day 2016 Reveals Feminism’s Problem With Love…and Women

A shorter version of this article first appeared in Salvo 27: Winter 2013. It has been updated and reprinted here with permission. Warning: in discussing the deviations of radical feminism, this article…

Suburban Pretensions

From James Kunstler’s Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century: “The suburban housing subdivision is not what it pretends to be. It is emphatically not a community, certainly…

“We were grateful for the smallest of mercies”

From ‘My Pilgrimage Towards Gratefulness‘: [In his book Man’s Search For Meaning] Viktor Frankl described how conditions of extreme deprivation and cruelty enabled the prisoners to attain incredibly high levels of gratitude…

I Dare You To Watch This Entire Video, from Adam Conover

If you can get through this entire video, it could change your life. When I watched this entire video I was tempted about 12 times to fast-forward it to the end, but…

Cognitive Empathy and Attention

From ‘Hollowing Out the Habits of Attention (part 3)‘: For relationships to be healthy, we need to know how to suspend what we think and put ourselves in the mind of our…

If You Want to Be Happy, Don’t Compare Yourself With Others

Throughout this year I’ve been doing an ongoing series of blog posts on the topic of gratitude. I want to continue that discussion by looking at one of the main barriers to…



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