*Today is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, declared patroness of the Americas, and bumped up to a feast day, by Pope Saint John Paul II. The image left on the tilma in those December days of 1531 resist scientific explanation to this day. No one knows why the frail tilma has not decomposed, […]
It is fitting on this feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of life, that we offer a hearty and warm congratulations to Father Alphonse de Valk who yesterday celebrated 50 years a priest. Father de Valk, a faithful member of the Congregation of Saint Basil, and the founder and editor-emeritus of both the Interim […]
*Today is the memorial of Saint John Damascene, who lived in what is in now Syria and died on this day in 749, in a land that even back then, in the early days of Muslim expansion, lived under Islamic domination. A polymath, gifted in many subjects, he was a great foe of the then-rampant […]
On his recent visit to our college this summer, the Jesuit scholar Father Koterski mentioned a book that he described as the ‘most influential he has ever read’, his fellow Jesuit’s Father Paul Quay’s “The Mystery Hidden for Ages in God”. Upon his effusive recommendation, I made a resolve to read the book, and this […]
The massacre in Paris yesterday marks the beginning, alas, of other tragedies to come. Well over one hundred dead, hundreds more injured, with a bomb going off in the Stade de France where President Hollande himself was taking in the French-German football (soccer) match. Our first response is to pray for the victims and […]
Dostoyevsky wrote, through the voice of Prince Myskin in his novel, The Idiot, that ‘beauty would save the world’. I have often wondered about that quotation, and whether it be true. A month or so ago, our Schola choir traveled to a parish 2 hours from where I live, to sing Schubert’s Mass in […]
In an interesting turn of events, the niqab, the face-covering veil worn by certain Muslim women, has become a defining election issue in Canada. Just today, Zunera Ishaq, who had petitioned for the right to take her citizenship oath wearing the veil, took that very oath, yes, with her face covered (she received a court […]
The Crusades are, in general, vilified, an example of Eurocentric, Anglo-Saxon and, worst of all, Christian imperialism turned fanatical, bloodthirsty, imposing their view of God and civilization on peaceful Arabians, who just wanted to build up their own civilization based on the tenets of their own religion, Islam, whose main premise is peace and […]
There is an old saying that the three rules of real estate are ‘location, location, location’. A similar rule applies to public speaking: ‘brevity, brevity, brevity’. And, we may also apply an analogous principle to teaching: ‘clarity, clarity, clarity’. The ultimate point of teaching is to transmit the truth that is in the teacher’s […]
In the college at which I teach, we believe in the ‘Great Books’, going back to the primary sources of our religion and civilization, the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, the Greek and Latin classics, the teachings of the Church, Dante, Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein, the great philosophers and literary geniuses. By reading original works, […]