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1 week ago | 
catholiceducation.org | Anthony Esolen |Msgr. Charles Fink |Theodore Dalrymple |Jeff Mirus
Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1504, Public Domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I am relieved to find that Pope Francis has refrained from saying that someday we may be conferring, or pretending to confer, Holy Orders upon women. It keeps alive the possibility that the churches East and West may reunite. It averts an inevitable and devastating schism.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
spectator.org | Anthony Esolen
Without leisure, man cannot think. But leisure is not the same as time away from the workplace. The Soviet man had no leisure in his dingy little flat, because the Soviet demands came to penetrate the mind, and eyes were watching and ears were listening, so that, even if you could trust your own children, which by no means was a sure thing, you could not trust the man in the dingy flat across from yours. A fleet and friendly smile might be but the bright flash of a knife.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
catholicworldreport.com | Daniel Payne |Anthony Esolen
Researchers underscore link between decline of marriage, plummeting fertility rates By Daniel Payne for CNA null / Credit: KieferPix/ShutterstockCNA Staff, Jan 10, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA). Researchers in Canada are highlighting the link that declining marriage rates are playing in the overall decline in fertility rates in North America and around the world. In their 2024 book “I…Do?
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
brownpelicanla.com | Anthony Esolen
The newly appointed archbishop of Washington, D.C., Robert McElroy, says that the Church has learned more about human sexuality since the days of St. Paul and that, armed with this knowledge, we can now interpret Paul’s strictures against homosexual behavior as applying only to its abusive forms in ritual prostitution and pederasty but not to people who are committed to loving one another till death should part them.
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Dec 27, 2024 | 
crisismagazine.com | Anthony Esolen
The cardinal of Chicago, Blase Cupich, has issued a directive to demand that parishioners in the archdiocese not kneel to receive Holy Communion, on the grounds that doing so interrupts the flow of the procession and calls attention to the individual.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
brownpelicanla.com | Anthony Esolen
Did You Know? Why the Mighty Mississippi Was Once Named ‘River of the Immaculate Conception’, by Jonah McKeownDecember 9, 2024 By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine, Dec. 9, 2024Dr. Anthony Esolen is the author of 28 books on literature, culture, and the Christian life, whose most recent work is In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
crisismagazine.com | Anthony Esolen
The Vatican has recently approved of some considerable alterations of the Novus Ordo celebrated in the Mexican diocese of Chiapas. These alterations are put forward as springing from immemorial Mayan traditions. The controversy leads me to think again about what it means to have any kind of culture at all, especially as against the phenomena of the masses, which bid fair to make the world into one great Nowhere. How can you tell Nowhere from Somewhere?
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
brownpelicanla.com | Anthony Esolen
In my previous column, I recommended that every diocese establish at least one library, as part of the Church’s mission to be the Mater et magistra (“Mother and teacher”), to a barbarian world. I described the kinds of books I have found at antique stores and junk shops, and even our town dump, whence I have gathered complete hardcover sets of the works of Washington Irving and George Eliot, probably a day or so before they would be destroyed.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
thecatholicthing.org | Anthony Esolen
In my previous column, I recommended that every diocese establish at least one library, as part of the Church’s mission to be the Mater et magistra (“Mother and teacher”), to a barbarian world. I described the kinds of books I have found at antique stores and junk shops, and even our town dump, whence I have gathered complete hardcover sets of the works of Washington Irving and George Eliot, probably a day or so before they would be destroyed.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
spectator.org | Anthony Esolen
This week at Thales College, my students encountered T. S. Eliot’s broken epic of social, spiritual, and intellectual fragmentation, The Waste Land. I asked them to imagine the aftermath, in Europe, of that “war to end all wars,” which saw the destruction of forms of life across all of the social classes.
