Category: Article

Have you ever been presented with a large box which, upon opening, is stuffed with packing peanuts, and, upon digging down, down, through handfuls of the wasteful nuggets, you finally uncover a small and insignificant bauble? That is what I think of when I hear the word “like.”  “Like” has its uses. As a verb it means “to enjoy, be fond of, or have an inclination to,” as in “I like ice cream.” That’s not a problem.  “Like” can also be used as an adjective meaning “similar to,” as in…

(Including Most of the Ones You Send) Apple announced recently that it is working on a new feature that will allow users to stop receiving texts from unknown numbers. The announcement was very popular with users, and not so popular with political fundraisers, for obvious reasons. There is a clear conflict here between the privacy interests of people who don’t want to be bothered on their phones, and the pecuniary interests of people who make a living bothering people on their phones. Senior citizens who are vulnerable to fraudulent text…

Without some prior wonder at creation as the declaration of its Author, and therefore as an intelligible reality that corresponds to minds because it is a product of Mind, all philosophy collapses into skepticism. —Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality  Last year, my wife and I moved to a small Maryland town not too far from our Potomac campus. The house we bought was formerly a two-room public school house in Montgomery County, built in 1899. I’ve met a few neighbors…

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on his writing. Over a century ago, the great Catholic writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote about the distinction between the supernatural virtue of hope and the disposition popularly referred to as “optimism.” On the eve of his reception into the Catholic Church, Chesterton was struck by the Penny Catechism’s teaching that the two sins against hope are presumption…

In 1989, I was a recently married lieutenant in the Army, stationed in Germany, and found myself—to this day I can’t remember how—in possession of a book entitled A Retreat for Lay People. It was a series of talks by a priest named Ronald Knox that followed the general outline of a retreat. Till then, just about any spiritual reading I had done was reminiscent of the times, with lots of exclamation points and titles like In Search of Me. This man was different. His tone was conversational yet respectful….

As a basis for mentoring, there may be no better starting point than knowledge of the virtues. Any school or organization endeavoring to begin or strengthen a mentoring program should consider this. If, from early on, we develop in our students a vocabulary of the virtues, a concrete understanding of these all-important ways of living, then our ability to mentor them is enhanced tremendously. Through discussion of the virtues we can address the roots of student weaknesses in constructive ways. Instead of starting from a place where we point out…

The world is not just a set of separately existing localized objects, externally related only by space and time…Something deeper, and more mysterious, knits together the fabric of the world.  —Tim Maudlin, professor of philosophy and physics at NYU. The poetry of Edward Thomas (1878-1917) teaches us how to look into a moment and see the world. William Blake, who saw eternity in a flower, would get Thomas’ poetry, though his own work is so vastly different it may as well have been written on another planet. The vision’s the…

Forcing the worst ideas of history on the next generation . . . for their own good  From 1961 to 1989, a wall famously encircled what was then known as West Berlin. West Germans called it the “Wall of Shame” (Mauer der Schande), a phrase coined by then-Mayor Willy Brandt. In the U.S., we called it simply “the Berlin Wall,” and though the term is neutral we all knew the wall was there to keep the residents of East Germany from escaping to the West—in other words, to keep them…

One of the great Christmas traditions is Frank Capra’s masterful film It’s a Wonderful Life. James Stewart, that most American of actors, plays the lead of George Bailey, an Everyman, a small-town ordinary guy struggling against the deceit, selfishness, and cynicism of a power-broker named Potter. Yet, for all its Americana, I find It’s a Wonderful Life a profound reflection on the teachings of my favorite saint, Francis de Sales, a seventeenth-century French bishop.  De Sales lived from 1567 to 1622 and was the titular bishop of Geneva, Switzerland, but…

When you take pen in hand and write a word, you do something approaching the divine. You are giving physical form to a thought. It is, in its way, an Incarnation. To do this with beauty and grace is to honor this Incarnation. This is penmanship.  Along with speaking, it is the most common form of Incarnation. We do it every day whether we’re signing a credit card receipt, writing a grocery list, or putting down our deepest thoughts in a journal. Like all Incarnations, it reflects who we are….