Topics
From the NOR Dossiers

Vital Works Reconsidered

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



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 dreams, our ambitions, and our fears, anxieties, and doubts.
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




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



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