Abraham's Journey
(While I am going to clear Desmond Birch’s scholarly response on St. Ambrose when he has finished it, this discussion on the validity or lack thereof of Pope Emeritus Benedict’s resignation and Pope Francis’ Papacy is now finished. I know it is earlier than I originally said, but it is clear to me that most […]
Read More The Foundation of AuthorityBy Charlie Johnston It is ironic that the most smugly self-righteous generation in our nation’s history will likely be looked at with revulsion by future generations for having knowingly perpetrated one of the great atrocities of history. Despite science proving that a child is fully human from the moment of conception, this generation insists on […]
Read More Short Takes: The Battle for Life, an Early Feminist and…Go Chiefs!(I had a very busy week early last week and then was a bit under the weather afterwards. I suspect it is going to be a very busy year for me and for all of us, so this may happen from time to time. But I get back on track today.-CJ) By Charlie Johnston On […]
Read More A Year of Judgment, A Time to ChooseBy Charlie Johnston Throughout the world, we are not what we once were. Whatever we will be after the existential agonies of these times have past, it will be something new. Whether sublimely good or horribly bad, it will not be what we have ever been before. There are a host of perils that face […]
Read More Counsel for the New YearBy Charlie Johnston It was St. Augustine’s Confessions that sparked my conversion to Catholicism nearly three decades ago. In the summer of 1990 I had spent a lot of time reading Reformation-era thinkers; Erasmus, John Donne, St. John of the Cross and Martin Luther, even excerpts from King Henry VIII’s defense of Catholicism written just […]
Read More The Love of My LifeBy Charlie Johnston “Great ones of the world, will your hearts always be hardened? Your Life has come down from heaven: will you not now at last rise with him and live? But how can you rise if you are in high places and your clamour reaches heaven? Come down from those heights, for then […]
Read More The Barren Lands – Short TakesBy Charlie Johnston “My soul magnifies the Lord” – The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) Back when I was a Protestant, it used to grate on me terribly to speak admiringly of a nobly inspiring character and have someone say, dismissively, “But he’s a Catholic.” Now that I am a Catholic, it annoys me equally to […]
Read More The Ballad of the Ordinary Man, Part Two – The Fellowship of True BelieversBy Charlie Johnston “If Francis had been Pope when you came into the Church, would you have still come in?” It was a clever question posed to me a few months ago by a shrewd friend. I had been a great admirer of St. John Paul the Great for over a decade before I was […]
Read More The Foundation of Authority: Mileposts on the Road to Rome
A Sign of Hope 