Things to Read

John Leo: A Journalist's Call to Accountability

When I learned that John Leo had retired as editor-in-chief of Minding the Campus, my thoughts leaped to T.S. Eliot’s final prayer at the end of Ash Wednesday: “Suffer me not to be separated.” The news came as a wrench, a decisive twist to the bolt on a repository of shaping memories, His writing was at the center of much that had stamped my wits and my interests over decades. The man entered my life through a Xeroxed copy of his December 1, 1965 column in the National Catholic Reporter. Continue Reading
Prêt-À-Manger Eucharist, etc.

More than monuments are toppling. Our sense of the sacred diminishes further with each week that fear of Wuhan virus ranks higher on parish concerns than the concept of sin. Thomas Mann once quipped that nowadays sin is “an amusing word used only when one is trying to get a laugh.” Now we can get our laughs untainted by any nagging guilt right in our own parishes. They have risen from slumber over the concept of sin in order to testify with vigor to hygiene in the age of COVID. Continue Reading
From Frank Sheed To A Queer Femme

Tanked up on rage, the mob is on the move. It wears a tame face here in my town: lawn signs, righteous statements in store windows, and silent vigils for BLM. But under the mask—both the disposable kind and the indelible one stamped on polite conformist psyches—lies the same disdain for our country. And the same assent to blood libel against white Americans. It is not necessary to replay here all that you have already read on the maelstrom of anti-Americanism whirling across the nation. Continue Reading
Memorial Day, 2020

To mark Memorial Day, 2007, Peter Collier wrote a magnificent reflection in the Wall Street Journal. Before he died this past November, he gave permission to his friends at Power Line to reprint it. Scott Johnson’s introduction is necessarily succinct: “The column remains timely and is accessible online here. I don’t think we’ll read or hear anything more thoughtful or appropriate to the occasion today.”Under the heading “America’s Honor,” the essay begins:
Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays.
Continue Reading
On Loving Popes & Other Strangers, part 2

Declarations of love for everyone are a bluff. To love Everyman, an abstraction, is akin to loving no one. In our heart of hearts, we concede we cannot love anyone we do not know. Love of neighbor binds us in kindliness to certain others. First among them are individuals we live among. These are family, followed by persons we abide with in friendship, encounter in daily life, greet in passing, conduct business with. St. Paul places “those who belong to the family of believers” (Gal. Continue Reading