MY STORY WITH NFP I read Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae three weeks before I got married. I was moved to tears by this solemn hymn to Holy Matrimony, and it solidified my growing conviction of the moral need to reject the use of artificial contraception. The logic was crystal clear and dazzling…
I’ve been away all day, and coming home— I can’t believe it—all the kids are leaping To tell me what’s transpired in my absence. They’re at the store together, five of them Propped in the shopping cart or following it, Their mother slowly leading down the aisle, To get the toilet paper, bread, a…
Patriarcha: The Complete Political Works. By Robert Filmer. Perth, AU: Imperium Press, 2021. 316 pp. $21.00 (paper). Liberal democracy is under fire these days, if the growing number of books critiquing it is any indication.[1] As part of this re-evaluation of liberalism, some on the reactionary right have written at length concerning what sort of…
Benjamin Hoadly, most infamous as bishop of Bangor, is punished. Touted as the symbol of the spiritual dearth that was the Augustan church, High Churchmen and Evangelicals excoriated the supposedly “Latitudinarian” (read: rationalist or modernist) captivity of the Church. Ministers worried about hobbies and tithes, reduced to employees of the Parliamentary Leviathan, the Hanoverian episcopal…
Article I. Of Faith in the Holy Trinity. THERE is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in the unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power,…
7 Now when the Pharisees gathered together to him, with some of the scribes, who had come from Jerusalem, 2 they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, observing the tradition of the elders; 4 and when they come from the…
Come, happy December, who shall observe you, who shall preserve you? Since golden October declined into sombre November And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land Became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud, The New Year waits. We wait with it. Here let us stand, close by…
Two months ago, Christian Wagner wrote a controversial article in the pages of this publication, titled “A Catholic Anglican Rule of Faith.” Against both a “Reformed option” and an “Evangelical option,” he asserted a “Catholic Anglican option” for a rule of faith. I wish it had been a catholic option, and not an essentially sectarian…
A recent Gallup poll indicating that church attendance in the United States has fallen below 50% for the first time shocked many American Christians. Conversely, a random internet search of “most popular Christian books of all time” yielded exactly what I expected to find: C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity was on nearly every list, often…
I was born in a shadow country Of roofless temples smudged with smoke, Where even the roadside shrines Sat jilted, their chintzy dioramas Strung with strands of christmas lights That lit the paths of small tin soldiers Shouldering their guns into darkness To hollow drums and distant music. O sing, cicada, sing… I grew up…