In 1906, my home town of San Francisco, then the largest city in the United States west of Chicago, was destroyed by earthquake and fire. When I was a kid there were still a lot of folks around who had … Continue reading
Category: Articles
Hope of the Half-Defeated
Especially after witnessing my German wife’s unlooked-for response very late the other night while (and moreso after) I read aloud to her for the first time G.K. Chesterton’s short essay, “Two Words from Poland,”1 I am now even more confident … Continue reading
‘Just a Brother’
It is often the case that when one of the brothers meets someone new, a variety of questions arise concerning exactly what we are. “What’s a brother?” “Are you a priest?” “What do brothers do?” “Why be a brother?” I … Continue reading
Clearing the Mind of Cant
G.K. Chesterton’s concluding words in his earnest 1936 essay “About Voltaire” were forcefully compact and sudden and yet, at first, a little too compressed for my immediate understanding, even though I had read those words more than once before: namely, … Continue reading
Tony
He was an impressive looking man when I first met him. I was a religious brother then, in the early 1980s. In his seventies at the time, Tony was well-built, robust, sartorial, well-groomed, and rather short; he had a deep … Continue reading
The Journey of Joseph Pearce
Review of Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love, by Joseph Pearce. Saint Benedict Press, 2013 Captivated by Joseph Pearce’s spiritual biography of the great Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and knowing that he has recently … Continue reading
Jerusalem, Jerusalem
Virtually the instant I saw that Spain’s Queen Isabella the Catholic was the subject of an excellent article by Eleonore Villarrubia recently posted on the SBC website, I thought of Christopher Columbus. This was natural. Though history is largely unknown … Continue reading
Evil Friendships in History
Not long before his widely lamented death on 14 June 1936, G.K. Chesterton had published a fresh collection of his essays, entitled As I Was Saying, an anthology expressing some of his well-pondered judgments after his fourteen fertile and grateful … Continue reading
November/December 2013 Mancipia
The November/December 2013 Mancipia is now posted (scroll down for PDF). Back issues of this newsletter are linked from our downloads page. If you would like to receive our bi-monthly newsletter via U.S. mail, please sign up to get it … Continue reading
Reflections on the Book and Wounds of Job
Through the prompt kindness of a vivid-souled Catholic priest, who is also a contemplative Maronite monk in Massachusetts, I recently received an undated, eleven-page text written by G.K. Chesterton and entitled “Introduction to the Book of Job.” It was, moreover, … Continue reading
‘Yo, La Reina’: Queen Of Half The Globe
Isabel, or Ysabel, as was the proper spelling during her own time, was an amazing woman. She has been called by many titles: First Lady of the Renaissance, The Godmother of the Americas, The Last Crusader, The Catholic Queen (an … Continue reading
Russia’s Putin: Why Liberals Hate Him
In September John McCain, someone who seems never to have met a war he didn’t love, went before television news cameras to spew vitriol on Vladimir Putin and Russia for thwarting plans to spread freedom and democracy by means of … Continue reading
Angelic Hosts
There is no aspect of Catholic theology more compelling to non-Catholics than the existence of Angels. Oh, where does one begin? Movies? It’s A Wonderful Life, Here Comes Mr. Jordan! (and its sequels and remakes), Gabriel Over the White House, … Continue reading
Reflections on the End of Time
“In the revealed prophecy of the end of history a catastrophic end within history is foretold. Whoever believingly accepts this [apocalyptic] prophecy, that is to say, whoever takes it to be revelation, has no possibility of ignoring the fact that … Continue reading
Signs of the Time
Recently a future King of England, dressed in an open-collared shirt and without a jacket, slid behind the steering wheel of a car and drove his wife, new-born son and himself away from a maternity hospital in London. He drove, … Continue reading
