As thousands stood in St. Peter’s Square last week, waiting anxiously to see the smoke rise from the great chimney of the Sistine Chapel, millions across the world prayed that the papal conclave would select the best man to be the Catholic Church’s new leader. At 7:41 PM Central European Time (1:41 PM Central Time), white smoke billowed out...
Last week, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he will step down from his papal seat on February 28th, an event that has not happened for about six centuries. The obvious questions arise: who will be his successor? And what will be the direction of the Church under the new Pope?
Benedict decided to step down because of health issues as...
Introduced into the Congressional record in 1945 amidst the pinnacle of the second Red Scare, “The Forty-Five Goals of Communism” was intended to subvert America on a cultural level with a communist agenda. Of course, this never came close to happening, but some of the tenets concerning art and music still remain, even though they never resulted in the...
It’s not every day that the Catholic Church makes an internal change. Indeed, the church has become a steady, unceasing bastion of tradition by maintaining continuity over a length of time that dwarfs nearly every other human institution in history.
The Catholic mass, in particular, has maintained a shocking consistency over the centuries: the mass that Jesuit College Prep students...
In 1906, young socialist Upton Sinclair rose from obscurity with the novel The Jungle, his expose of American meat packing. Sinclair’s version of the “Great American Novel” shocked the world with its gut-wrenching description of unsafe, unsanitary, and generally sickening practices of the meat packing industry (e.g., rat droppings and diseased meat jammed into sausage grinders, disgusting floor filth and...
Two weeks ago, the American sports world held its biggest event of the year, the one and only Super Bowl; now, it’s time to shift our focus to the American entertainment world, as they get ready to hold their biggest event of the year: the Oscars.
This Sunday, February 27th, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will be...
American exceptionalism seems to get a bad rap these days. After two centuries of support of the excellence of our nation, from Presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln, who alluded to American exceptionalism in his Gettysburg Address (“a new nation conceived in liberty”) down to ordinary American citizens a new generation of hand-wringing pundits and intellectuals has determined that our...
