Topics
From the NOR Dossiers

Vital Works Reconsidered

Time & the Longing for Eternity
November 2024Flannery O'Connor’s writing is not grotesque, not fantastic; it’s merely simple — which is to say that for her, in the end, there are only two options: time or eternity.
VIEW ARTICLE
Finding God’s Will in Each Moment
June 2022In the many stories of saints who followed their inspirations despite the seeming impossibility of what God was asking them to do, He was the source of life for these souls.
VIEW ARTICLE
Why a Self-Indulgent Age Needs a Rough Religion
March 2022Penance is man’s pitiful part in cooperation with grace, an extreme method necessary to combat the difficulties posed by the passion and the pride of man.
VIEW ARTICLE
Is There Such a Thing as Catholic Feminism?
November 2021Kristin Lavransdatter’s story shows that following our own desires brings pain but also that God remains with us and draws us into His love and service.
VIEW ARTICLE
Man’s Natural Aptitude for the Divine
June 2021Willa Cather, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, offers a clear literary portrait of a man who sees the divine in the ordinary.
VIEW ARTICLE
Chesterton on Man, the Religious Animal
April 2021GKC asserts that Jesus was not merely one of many great figures in history; rather, He is at the center of all history: past, present, and future.
VIEW ARTICLE
Fragmented Lives of Incomplete Reckoning
November 2019Man’s efforts are lost if they are not embedded in and do not proceed from the eternal perspective, without which they remain fragmented impulses.
VIEW ARTICLE
Your Guide to the Interior Life
May 2019The Imitation is the finest work of Catholic spirituality. Thomas à Kempis’s voice speaks to us today with the same authority that his monks heard nearly six centuries ago.
VIEW ARTICLE
Is Modern Man Too Healthy for Literature?
January-February 2018Americans do read — street signs, job applications, directions for installing video games, glossy magazines. But, sad to say, most Americans do not read literature.
VIEW ARTICLE
To Die from Having Lived
September 2017It is to have performed the obligations of one's vocation, to have used one's gifts and opportunities to give glory to God and serve others.
VIEW ARTICLE
When No Man Was His Own
July-August 2016The plot of 'The Tempest' is threadbare and fantastical. Shakespeare is less concerned with unfolding a story than with unfolding characters.
VIEW ARTICLE
A Surrender Total & Complete
May 2016In preparation to embrace God’s providence, Fr. Caussade has us renounce our self-love, our will, our efforts, our plans, and our fears, anxieties, and doubts.
VIEW ARTICLE
Freedom, But to What End?
January-February 2016'Torrents of Spring' appears almost intentional in its diminishment of patriarchy. Turgenev does not seem to connect the tragedy of his characters to the absence of their fathers.
VIEW ARTICLE
The Tears of a Cleric
November 2015Bernanos has much to teach us about the clerical state, particularly that being a priest is not really about power, unless it is the power of self-sacrifice.
VIEW ARTICLE
A Lifeboat for a Sinking Society
April 2015Not seeing man for what he is would be insanity. We must strive for sanity, which consists in "seeing what is, living in the reality of things."
VIEW ARTICLE
Average Is Not Normal
January-February 2015Normal signifies the way things ought to be, according to a fixed moral or divine standard. Average frequently denotes middle in the sense of mediocrity.
VIEW ARTICLE
Through a Lens, Darkly
December 2014Excessive confidence in the supposedly foolproof technical quality of America’s nuclear-weapon system is the subject of the classic thriller "Fail-Safe."
VIEW ARTICLE
A Thomistic Vision of Man's Final End
November 2014Dante relied heavily on the philosophy of Aquinas to construct his epic. The Divine Comedy has been referred to as the “Summa in verse.”
VIEW ARTICLE
Purgatory on Earth
May 2014Dostoyevsky's 'The Idiot' is a profound testament to the power of purgatorial justice and mercy. A lifelong anti-Catholic, he did not connect it to dogma.
VIEW ARTICLE

Martyrdom in Mexico: Graham Greene's Masterpiece
June 2013At its heart, The Power and the Glory is about the conflict between Caesar and God, with the lieutenant symbolizing the power and the lowly priest the glory.
VIEW ARTICLE
On Gratitude & Growing Up
April 2013Dickens's best tales have the cadence of great drama, and there is something universal and enduring in his depiction of life's mysteries that we all relate to yet can't explain.
VIEW ARTICLE
What Is Free Time For?
March 2013Because we are ultimately not the source of our own value or knowledge, then "finding ourselves" is not the ultimate goal; finding (or approaching) the truth is.
VIEW ARTICLE
The Invalid Identification of Contraries With Contradictories
January-February 2013Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's magnum opus, might be the most perplexing and infuriating novel ever written.
VIEW ARTICLE
Misreading a Masterpiece
November 2012Critical approaches to Cervantes ignore that substantially documented biographical facts of his life do establish that he was a practicing and ardent Catholic.
VIEW ARTICLE
Ancient Perspective on the Postmodern Condition
July-August 2012The classics could teach what virtue is, but they could not figure out a way to practice it. The Christian would argue for the help of grace. But even with grace things go wrong.
VIEW ARTICLE
Shelter From the Storm
June 2012Lear is able to pull back from his obsession to pledge that "I will be the pattern of all patience"; patience, he knows, is the remedy he needs if he is to retain his sanity.
VIEW ARTICLE
Elemental & Sophisticated Evil
April 2012The evil that dominates the modern world wears the cloak of legal authority and moral respectability yet strives to expunge every trace of true goodness.
VIEW ARTICLE
Saints of Social Revolution
December 2011Tolstoy was a world-class novelist and a great and influential heretic: His avant-garde views heralded today’s liberal and relativistic Christians.
VIEW ARTICLE
Recalling the Glories of the Faith
October 2011Karl Adam's great achievement is to remind us of the inexhaustible resources the Church possesses to carry out her task.
VIEW ARTICLE
Advice to Hell Raisers
June 2011Lies are easier to spread than in the old days, when there were many more farmers than there were scholars, and farmers were harder to fool.
VIEW ARTICLE
The Third Man & the Third Millennium
May 2011Graham Greene sees the most dangerous thing of all: ordinary human beings unwilling to distinguish between the dollar and the cross.
VIEW ARTICLE
To Question Authority
January-February 2011Turgenev captures an authentic truth in his work: Boys who do not respect their fathers' authority will respect no authority at all.
VIEW ARTICLE
Three Victorian Morality Tales
July-August 2010See how three authors — in varying degrees of sympathy with, or hostility toward, Christianity — expressed their conception of the basic struggle between good and evil.
VIEW ARTICLE








The Other War We Lost in Vietnam
December 1991President Johnson was seduced by his macho superpatriotism into the morass of Vietnam, and so the war against poverty was lost too.
VIEW ARTICLE

Orthodoxy — as Opposed to Fundamentalism, Theological Liberalism & Integralism
May 1991 VIEW ARTICLE
That Incomprehensible Mystery at the Heart of All Things
January-February 1991Like Oedipus, we humans are prone to suppose that we can understand all things on earth — perhaps in heaven also — and can thereby control them.
VIEW ARTICLE



Intellectual Opportunism & the Arteriosclerosis of the American Intelligentsia
April 1990 VIEW ARTICLE

The Conspiratorial World View of Whittaker Chambers
November 1989The road from the Hiss-Chambers case to an American president’s advocacy of the idea of the Evil Empire was straight, though slow.
VIEW ARTICLE
The Burden of History & the Promise of Divine Life
After grappling with "A Canticle for Leibowitz," it seems to me that Walter M. Miller Jr.’s novel attempts to study nothing less than the whole problem of history.
VIEW ARTICLE