You Won’t Believe These Nativity Sets — 2021!

Matt Vander Vennet Matt Vander Vennet currently resides somewhere in central Illinois. Matt is a doctoral candidate studying Church History at the Catholic University of America, is currently writing his dissertation, and is the advancement director for a local Catholic high school. Matt holds an M.A. from Holy Apostles College & Seminary and an M.Phil … Lire la suite

The Truth About “The Twelve Days of Christmas”

Unless you’ve been channeling Patrick from SpongeBob SquarePants and have been living under a rock for your entire life, you’ve probably heard the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. If your Catholic, you might’ve also heard that the song was written in code for Catholics at a time when Oliver Cromwell was persecuting Catholics in … Lire la suite

When the Fear of God Leaves a Society

Blessed are those who fear the Lord!—Psalm 128 The fool hath said in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1, 53:1). This Psalm passage is familiar to any reader of Anselm’s Proslogion. It is therefore associated very directly with the ontological argument for the existence of God and for many has no other association. The … Lire la suite

Childhood and the Dangers of the Storied Self

Stanley Hauerwas rejected the Kantian foundation of ethical systems, and the concomitant scientific understanding of “rationality,” that construes the ratio of moral agency as one of choosing a discrete course of action over another in his 1977 essay, “From System to Story”[1]: It is our contention that the tendency of modern ethical theory to find … Lire la suite

A Patristic Critique of Political Economy

Eugene McCarraher, in a prophetic voice that captures the deranged spirit of the age (and the Partristic critique of it), writes in his The Enchantments of Mammon: The grotesque ontology of scarcity and money, the tawdry humanism of acquisitiveness and conflict, the reduction of rationality to the mercenary principles of pecuniary reason—this ensemble of falsehoods that … Lire la suite