Qui fideliter cuncta faciebant.
Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) was a French Catholic philosopher and a close friend of St. Pope Paul VI who had an enormous influence on the Second Vatican Council. He is known as a political theorist of Christian Democracy, "Thomistic personalism," and "Integral Humanism," especially in the Catholic Worker Movement. The following excerpt is from his 1966 … Continue reading Jacques Maritain on the Left/Right Spectrum
Among her secular leftist and Communist friends, Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, often encountered lifestyles and ideologies which promoted sexual sin. As a convert to Catholicism, who repented of the “free love” and fornication of her past life, Dorothy frequently referenced Lenin’s commentary on “bourgeois immorality” to help her revolutionary friends understand … Continue reading Vladimir Lenin on the Errors of the Sexual Revolution
The following easy excerpt is from Chapter Six: "The Use of Energy” of Wendell Berry’s famous book “The Unsettling of America” (1977), an essential critique of the cultural and agricultural damage caused by the technocratic domination of farming and food production. Though it seems impossible to distinguish between the living and the mechanical aspects of … Continue reading Wendell Berry on the “Cheerful Prophets” of Modernity
The following excerpt is taken from the book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, pages 79-80. The book was published by Pope Francis, in collaboration with his biographer, in December 2020. One of the effects of conflict is to see as contradictions what are in fact contrapositions, as I like to call … Continue reading Pope Francis on Dialectics and Dialogue