We’re a culture of self-absorbed consumers who use noise and distractions to manage our lack of shared meaning. What that produces in us is a drugged heart – a heart neither restless for God nor able to love and empathize with others. There.
I want to stress again the importance of really living what we claim to believe. That needs to be a priority-not just in our personal and family lives but in our churches, our political choices, our business dealings, our treatment of the poor; in other words, in everything we do.
Creation is more than an accident of dead matter. It’s a romance. It has purpose. It sings of the Living God. It bears his signature.
We’re Catholics before we’re Democrats. We’re Catholics before we’re Republicans. We’re even Catholics before we’re Americans, because we know that God has a demand on us prior to any government demand on us. And this has been the story of the martyrs through the centuries.
Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.
The White House elected to power in November 2008 campaigned on compelling promises of hope, change, and bringing the nation together. The reality it delivered for eight years was rather different: a brand of leadership that was narcissistic, aggressively secular, ideologically divisive, resistant to compromise, unwilling to accept responsibility for its failures, and generous in spreading blame. As.
The Founders believed that liberty depended on persons with the maturity to avoid both radical self-assertion and a timid reliance on the state.
In decoupling gender from biology and denying any given or “natural” meaning to male and female sexuality, gender ideology directly repudiates reality. People don’t need to be “religious” to notice that men and women are different. The evidence is obvious. And the only way to ignore it is through a kind of intellectual self-hypnosis.
Aelred writes that true Christian friendship begins with two people who are drawn to some quality of holiness or virtue they see in each other. Since both persons love Jesus Christ and want to build their friendship on their love of Christ, Jesus is, in a real sense, the third person in their friendship.
One of the ways in which a good Christian marriage mirrors the divine is that, just as God’s love overflowed into creation, so the love of man and woman should overflow into new life. The family is the “domestic Church” where parents preach the word of God to their children by example and instruction.30 It’s a school of deeper and more fruitful humanity.31.
The point of course is to be a great saint, to love greatly, rightly, and with passion, until we burn ourselves up in service to God and to others. Our wholeness, our integrity, depends on the health of our friendship with God. It was he who fashioned us from the dust. It was he who breathed his life into our bodies. So when we ignore God’s Word, we violate our own identity.
If we don’t believe in the devil, sooner or later we won’t believe in God. Try as we might, and as awkward as it might be for our own peace of mind, we can’t cut Lucifer out of the ecology of salvation. The supernatural is real, and his existence is near the heart of this world’s confusion, fears, sufferings, and spiritual struggles.
As with democratic politics, the market is a mass of individuals making discrete choices within a framework shaped by larger forces, over which they have limited control.
Religion is to democracy as a bridle is to a horse. Religion moderates democracy because it appeals to an authority higher than democracy itself.5 But.
We need to engage him with our whole lives. That means cleaning out the garbage of noise and distraction from our homes. It means building real Christian friendships. It means cultivating oases of silence, worship, and prayer in our lives. It means having more children and raising them in the love of the Lord. It means fighting death and fear with joy and life, one family at a time, with families sustaining one another against the temptations of weariness and resentment.
It’s easier to accept lies by invoking a misguided alibi of tolerance and mutual respect than to live outside the cone of public approval. This is clear in every recent national debate over abortion, marriage, family, sexuality, and rights in general. Many of us are happy to live with half-truths and ambiguity rather than risk being cut out of the herd. The culture of lies thrives on our own complicity, lack of courage, and self-deception. The.
And as John Adams told the Massachusetts militia in 1789, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” There.
Marriage curbed the selfishness so natural to humans by binding a man and woman together, and even more by binding them to their children. Religious faith offered the purpose and reinforcement to sustain family structure. What.
Without the restraints of some higher moral law, democracy instinctively works against natural marriage, traditional families, and any other institution that creates bonds and duties among citizens. It insists on the autonomous individual as its ideal. In.
As Kraynak notes, “the Founders believed that freedom was based on moral order, not moral relativism.” They drew their natural law principles from John Locke, Cicero, and others, as well as from the strong natural law tradition in Christian thought. Thus, for Kraynak, “Without natural law – meaning an objective moral law put into nature and human nature by the Creator – the ideal of republican liberty lacks an ultimate foundation.”13 The.