A newsletter I read signs off the same way every time: “To a future of Abundance.” The writer, futurist Peter Diamandis, is one of the leading evangelists for what artificial intelligence is about to do for us, and I read him because he gives confident voice to the optimism our culture now takes for granted.…
Because J.R.R. Tolkien was a serious Catholic, one might assume religion would be obvious in his literary masterpiece. Yet there is no religion in The Lord of the Rings in the usual sense. There is magic and even glimpses of the demonic, but the world Tolkien creates is wholly contained within itself: large, old, mythological,…
The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus produces one ultimate, marvellous fruit: a heart like Jesus’ own. Near the end of the Litany of the Sacred Heart, we pray that “Jesus, gentle and humble of heart, touch our hearts and make them like your own”. Gentleness and humility shape the heart of the one…
Joseph does not draw attention to himself. He listens, and he acts, exemplifying the disciple as one who hears “the word of God and acts on it” (Lk 8:21). Whenever we turn to Joseph, we are led, through him, to discover the God he obeyed and the mission he served. The Litany of St Joseph…
In this ancient mosaic, Christ receives his mother at her death as lovingly as she once received him at his birth. Writes Leonard J. DeLorenzo This mosaic appears in the apse of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome. The first time I saw it, I was spellbound. I had never before seen…