Crisis Magazine

Looking over the last lines of T.S. Eliot’s fabled Four Quartets, the great masterwork on which his reputation rests, one sees in the final movement of the poem a striking reminder of that which we do well never to forget. It is the knowledge that, in this life certainly, We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the…

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Earlier this week, Candace Owens announced that she had converted to Catholicism. Posting about her conversion on social media, she wrote: Recently, I made the decision to go home. There is of course so much more that went into this decision and that I plan to share in the future. But for now, praise be to God for His gentle, but relentless guiding of my heart toward Truth.

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In the April 9 installment of Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, Uri Berliner, a senior editor at National Public Radio, spilled the few credibility beans remaining in public radio’s corporate pot. According to the 25-year veteran of NPR, the organization’s initial stage-one bias has aggressively metastasized to produce a decline and homogenization of its listening audience. To put a finer point on it…

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Various commentaries I have read so far about the latest declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith have been marked by a kind of relief. Some feared that the dicastery would be forging ahead in controversy and were surprised by the orthodoxy (o tempora, o mores) of the summary of teachings it represents. I think that one aspect of the declaration has been ignored.

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Everyone has “windows of opportunity” in their life. For most men and women, they are about fairly similar things at fairly similar times: you start speaking between 1 and 2; at the crucible of middle school, social skills development; puberty occurring between 8 and 15; the golden window for marriage, perhaps 22-30, followed by the best years for pregnancies; a man’s earning peak between…

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The dropping of the atomic bomb was evil. For the average conservative commentator, this comment automatically causes a knee-jerk reaction with the same old platitudes. For decades, the American Right has been the defender of our usage of the atomic bomb, with either “it saved more American lives” or “it was the lesser of two evils” being some of the strongest candidates.

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Beneath the papal altar in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, among the grottos and tombs, is the chapel of the Madonna della Bocciata. Inspiring. Revered. But often overlooked. Few of the five million annual Vatican visitors venture down the steps to tour the grottos, and of those that do, many miss the fresco of the Madonna placed there in the 1600s. Painted by Pietro Cavallini (c. 1250-1330)…

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Catholics Answers just announced the release of the “Father Justin” interactive AI app, which will “provide users with faithful and educational answers to questions about Catholicism.” I have to admit, I have a lot of conflicting thoughts on this. As a former tech geek, I still get excited by advances in technology. On just that basis, it’s amazing what these apps can do. I took “Father…

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What would cause a man (and in almost every case it is a man) to burn himself alive? Two men in recent months have publicly done so: one protesting the Israeli assault on Hamas, the other’s motive somewhat unclear but somehow connected to the trial of Donald Trump. In the Roman Martyrology, we often read of the faithful being burned alive by authorities who feared Christ and His ability to…

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A few years ago, my dad got a notification on his computer that it had a virus. He followed the notification’s prompts to protect his computer and dialed the number flashing on his screen. The person who answered the phone expressed deep concern and asked my dad a few questions to gain remote access to the apparently sick computer in a ruse to assist him. Unsurprisingly for most readers…

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In a recent essay, I argued that Americans—both secular and, increasingly, Catholic ones—experience a “flattened” sense of time. Time just simply “passes by” with little to distinguish it, with our increasingly attenuated civil holidays (including those shorn of their religious and/or historical content) trying to contend against a brutally “immanentized” approach to time. To remedy this…

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“I once thought it would be amusing,” writes Albert Jay Nock, “to attempt an essay on how to go about discovering that one is living in a dark age.” His answer, which is not at all amusing, is simply to watch all the lights go out and see if anyone noticed. And, of course, no one did. At least not among the so-called educated elites, the thought police swarming about in our midst…

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It is hard to say which have been the lowest points in the history of the Church. The fourteenth century was pretty wretched. The papacy, exiled from Rome to Avignon, was largely in the pocket of the French monarchy. Then, after the pope finally returned to Rome, the French cardinals set up a rival pope, technically an anti-pope, at Avignon. If anything, however, the eighteenth century would be…

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HBO’s Real Time host and longtime leftist Bill Maher made headlines this past weekend when he chastised Republicans’ ever-shifting stance on abortion in a panel discussion on the Arizona Supreme Court’s recent landmark ruling upholding a near-total abortion ban. The Arizona Court took up the case in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which Republicans, including former President Trump…

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Our daughter Lucy is about to graduate high school and, in the fall, begin classes at the University of Dallas. Let me tell you her story, the beginning part anyway. My wife and I are late vocations to marriage. I was 47. Cathy was 39. Our first date was on the Feast of Joachim and Anne, and it was the best first date since Joachim met Anne. I think I am on firm theological ground here.

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In this current age of mass media and constant Internet access, the process of theological reception can oftentimes be rushed and clumsy. The race is on, as it were, to forge and brandish one’s latest “hot take” on any given Church topic, document, or papal interview. Merely minutes after the introduction of Dignitas Infinita by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF)…

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Fr. Carlos Martins is the founder and director of Treasures of the Church, a Vatican-sponsored ministry of evangelization through the promotion of veneration of the relics of the saints. Martins is currently on a 100-city American tour with a relic of the arm of St. Jude, a tour which began in Chicago in September 2023, circumnavigated the country in a clockwise fashion, and is currently making…

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It has become evident to many Catholics around the world that the Francis pontificate has been a disappointment and even a disaster. There are more learned Catholics than myself who have meticulously catalogued the myriad of ways in which Pope Francis, from the beginning of his pontificate in 2013, has made statements and promoted pastoral practices that depart from Scripture, Sacred Tradition…

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So how committed to abortion are Americans really? This seems to be the burning question haunting the minds of pro-lifers right now. If we go by the recent referendums on abortion in reliably red states like Kansas or Ohio, then it seems like a majority of Americans really want the freedom to abort their unborn children. Recent polls in deep-red Florida, which will have the abortion issue on…

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We, the pro-life community, finally fell into this great chasm, one that was always right before our eyes. The obvious judicial decision by Alabama’s Supreme Court that frozen embryos are in fact children, and their accidental death warrants a wrongful death lawsuit to proceed, puts the light on this Grand Canyon among all those fighting to stop abortion but not exactly protect every life…

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