Discover

“Tenderness,” said Flannery O’Connor, when it is cut off from the person of Christ, “is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” Surely, tender Americans who shrug Jesus away, with His immeasurable mercy and His immovable assertion of the truth, will never fall into the ghastly hygiene of the Germans who murdered hundreds of Jews at a time by Zyklon gas coming through the shower heads, or into the political cruelty of the Russian gulags, where, as amenities, you got fly-ridden pots of thin slop to eat from and a small daily square of cardboard to clean yourself with at the privy. And this is true, sort of. It’s not in the American style. Nor in the Canadia...

By Fr. Jerry Pokorsky ( bio – articles – email ) | Nov 21, 2022 We spend much of our lives avoiding conflict if we can, a noble aspiration. We settle family disputes, avoid war, and hope for reconciliation within and among nations. The manic-depressive election cycles drive us crazy. Pharmaceutical companies promise to eliminate pain and extend our lives. Are we hard-wired for perpetual turmoil? Or is there a cure for our restlessness? Perhaps an old sci-fi film will help us begin to place human conflict into perspective. In the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man, the main character, Scott, is on vacation with his wife. A strange mist covers him, and six months later, Scott notices his clothes are too large. He is shrinking. Scott’s steady decrease makes him a nationa...

(Image: Screenshot / www.ncronline.org) The folks over at the National Catholic Reporter must think we have poor memories or no memory at all. For decades, the Reporter positioned itself as the loyal opposition to what it viewed as an overly authoritarian papacy thwarting the “true reform” of the Church. Operating from within a populist, liberal modality, they adopted the rhetoric of the various grassroots political movements of the Sixties in order to agitate for broad and sweeping changes in Church doctrine, morality, and practice. The new democratic ethos of modernity and the secular liberal trends of contemporary culture all pointed toward a “curve of history” that the Church needed to get in line with or perish. The “people of God” metaphor was put in the service of this populist mess...

Glenn Miller and my dad taught me a lesson: It is not just talent that produces inspirational music — it is love. Many of Jimmy Stewart’s movies are widely known and loved for plenty of good reasons. For millions of people, It’s A Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Harvey are favorite viewing. But there’s another Jimmy Stewart movie you may have missed. It’s a rags-to-riches musical called The Glenn Miller Story. When the movie opens, we see Glenn buying back his trombone from a pawn shop, and we get the idea that he has hocked it several times before. Glenn is a trombonist by profession, but he aspires to become a successful musical arranger. The problem is, no one else — not even his closest friend — seems to believe in his dream. We also learn that Glenn has a love interes...

Jesus makes becoming like children a condition for entrance into heaven and hence for the everlasting participation in divine life to which we are all invited. The human being is not only to begin as a child, as it were, but also to end as one. Liberal culture’s anti-child practices are bound up with a logic of childlessness most basically defined in terms of a forgetfulness of being and its Origin and expressed by the marginalization of philosophy, leisure, and liturgy as ways of being and acting. We can adequately address either these practices or this logic only by addressing both of them at the same time. The argument is that we will succeed in carrying out the tasks indicated here only by re-centering the culture in conception, birth, and being born: That is, in these as realized lite...