Douthat’s column suggest that it’s a mistake to assume that misery is always an imposition, something that can’t be “anything but terrifying.” If nothing else, he writes, sharing misery is a kind of truth-telling. The more pressure we feel to keep it private, the more warped our view of the world becomes. [...] Sharing sorrow… Read More
Tag: Aleteia
Don’t Dox the Alt-Right
"For many of the rally attendees, Charlottesville may be the first time they gathered with the people they’d spoken to online, their first chance to see the movement they’d joined in the flesh. For some of them, that first encounter, and the violence that they were a part of, may have left them with a… Read More
The Lazy Way To Fall In Love With Others
"Having someone come into my home offers me an opportunity to learn to love them better—by a process a bit gentler than aggressively willing myself to love them. Simply having someone over gives me a chance to cultivate what C.S. Lewis calls a storgé sort of love: the love born from familiarity and shared circumstances. Storge… Read More
Hamilton, Temptation, and Grace
"The grace of forgiveness is larger than the horror of losing a child or the betrayal of adultery. It’s so large as to be unimaginable until (and even after) the moment that it is offered. Perhaps one reason that Hamilton couldn’t imitate St. Therese and flee temptation is that he had no idea what he… Read More
Give Us This Day Our Daily Hedgehog
"After Aslan is resurrected [in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe], he travels to the witch’s castle and frees the animals she had turned to stone. A lion he rescues is so overwhelmed by this grace that he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. The most pleased of the lot was the… Read More
Adjusting to the Pass/No-Fail of Lent
"In truth, I wasn’t attracted to Fr. Schmemann’s prescriptions because I thought they stood a good chance of opening my whole day to Christ; I liked them because they were a little extreme and a lot emphatic. They felt like they might be enough. Trying to make sure I’ve done my duty by God is,… Read More
The Little Way of Terry Pratchett
"Reading [Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax] as an atheist, it was the first time I’d seen a definition of sin that didn’t sound like, as Francis Spufford describes our modern use of the word in Unapologetic, a kind of “enjoyable naughtiness” that seemed mostly to do with sex or very expensive chocolates. But the kind of sin… Read More