The Triduum is upon us. These are the three days in which we walk with Christ through his darkest moments—those times that were so monstrous because of us. It’s also a time in which we see so clearly that He knows what it is to suffer in every way, not only in the more direct manner as upon the Cross, but in the preparation for that end.

The more common sufferings of life, like loneliness and betrayal, are those that we rarely compare to the pains that Christ endured, even though they too were among his burdens. When we experience them, it takes longer for us to look to Christ as someone who has suffered likewise. In that omission, we fail to see such things as crosses that we are called to bear. Yet, at this time of the year, the Church summons us to focus thereupon, and to be with Him in these very human sufferings.

When we experience these pangs, we forget how much more so He felt them while preparing for a torturous death: As he begged his dearest friends to stay awake with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane as he prayed and grieved. Even, perhaps worst of all, when He had his last meal with them before the Passion, while knowing how they would betray him—how they too would be responsible for the wounds He would bear. Yet he drew them closer, instituting the Eucharist and the Priesthood.

There’s a sadness in contemplating that degree of isolation, such that the trial that is ahead is truly one’s own. But it is also true in some sense for all of us, when examined honestly. Our closest companions betray, die, fade away, or even simply branch into different areas of their lives. From beginning to end, there is no certainty nor sure companion except God. He who was most isolated now comforts us in the midst of our aloneness. While we can experience warmth in the proximate union of friends as we endure trials, the internal battles can only be fought and endured alone. Moreover, the choices that will manifest in our Eternity are ours to make—alone.

There is a key difference between us and Him, of course. Unlike Him, we have not only been betrayed, but we have been traitors. We have not only suffered, but been the cause of suffering in others. We have earned suffering, but He had not.

     I saw the Son of God go by
     Crowned with the crown of thorn.
     "Was it not finished, Lord?" I said,
     "And all the anguish borne?"

     He turned on me His awful eyes:
     "Hast thou not understood?
     Lo! Every soul is Calvary,
     And every sin a rood."

         —Rachel Annand Taylor

This Triduum, as you reflect on suffering, isolation, and betrayal as one who can empathize with those pains, remember to also do so with the honest view of oneself as someone who has caused it, for therein we see our unworthiness of His gift.

Have a blessed Triduum.

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Let’s take a moment to consider three tiers of performance culture, in which people present a version of themselves to the broader public that is disparate from who they are. Contrary to what’s often claimed, the primary harm is not to those being deceived, but to the deceiver himself. As we move up toward tier three, we can see a much more modern phenomenon, in which one’s basic need for privacy is no longer even the cause of the behavior.

Tier One can even be healthy

We think we know who people are by an impressive job title. “English professor” gives us a view of the whole man, we believe. He’s studious, dresses well, intelligent, not into sports, very unlikely to be criminal, and so on. But the job title only tells us of his accomplishment. His true battles are hidden from us, and we can claim no right to know them. His guardedness with strangers and self-identification with his successes represents pretty healthy behavior.

Not only do we make sweeping assumptions based upon such small snippets of information, but that is generally how people wish to be understood. It is the fragment of their lives that they present to the broader world—not just because they find it defining, but because they wish it were. We all prefer to be identified by our successes rather than our totality, particularly by strangers. Another way of putting that is to say that we find the truth to be unsettling.

To some degree, this tier can represent a natural and healthy privacy, as opposed to sharing painful memories with strangers.

Tier Two is pride-induced self-harm

In a similar but more exaggerated vein, people on social media display a curated image of success. Whether they emphasize their supposed wealth via shots of their new purchases or simply exaggerated happiness through dramatic, energy-filled presentations on camera, they craft an image. Not only do they desire to share this more than the truth—it’s what people want to see. Boring or melancholic presentations don’t get views. Poverty doesn’t attract. Depression doesn’t inspire.

In fact, “influencer” is the top dream job of Generation Alpha, incorporating Youtubers, TikTok Creators, and online streamers, according to Fortune:

Gen Alpha’s Dream Jobs

1. YouTuber (32%)

2. TikTok creator (21%)

3. Doctor/nurse (20%)

4. Mobile app/video game developer (19%)

5. Entrepreneur (17%)

6. Artist (16%)

7. Sports athlete (15%)

8. Professional online streamer (15%)

9. Musician (14%)

10. Teacher (14%)

But the reality of those dreams is much darker. Each year, we have a new list of YouTubers who have taken their own lives. A recent study showed that some ten percent of content creators struggle with suicidal thoughts—twice that of the general population.

To act counter to the truth is self-erasing, and that takes a toll on the soul. Those who curate an image of themselves, and especially who do so all day long, must eventually acknowledge that it isn’t who they are. And often, that means recognizing that they are not who they consider to be the “ideal” person. Perhaps they’re not rich enough, or energetic enough, or their real friends don’t laugh at their jokes like online sycophants. Whatever the case, there’s a disconnect between outward portrayal and inward turmoil.

Don’t misunderstand—personal stories ought to remain personal, and we not have a “right” to the intimate history of another, especially a stranger. But what is not considered, especially by those perpetually doing so, is that presenting a chronically false view of oneself is destructive too.

Tier Three Has Self-Erased

Then there’s the next level of performance culture, in which a person only lives online, so he has no formed self to present. These people tend to be too socially inept to exist in Tier 2. They are a very modern product, because their mode of existence requires a certain level of industrialization and reliance on others.

This person only knows how to echo the opinions of a subculture. His own “personality,” to the degree that such is defined by interests and how one presents in a social setting, has not been defined. He hasn’t engaged in hobbies, quarreled and competed and laughed with human friends in the real world, or thereby learned the healthy boundaries of social contexts. He is isolated and is thus most vulnerable to the artificial socialization that can occur online.

These are the people found deep within gamer communities and immersed in Reddit, embodying the stereotype of the person who still lives in his parents’ basement well into his thirties. The problem isn’t that he is presenting a fake person online, but that his ability to engage with real people is so nebulous that there is no way for him to be fake—or real.

It’s easier for these people to get confused about the line between reality and the Internet world, thereby allowing themselves to be swept into, for example, perverse ideological movements masquerading as something moral. That is the story of how so many young people became “trans” after thousands of hours on Tumblr, Discord, and similar websites (while being described as detached loners by those who had occasion to see them in the flesh.) It’s likewise the environment wherein so many of our mass shooters are formed. One story after another describes those assailants as entirely disconnected from reality, and to some degree, from their own humanity.

Grasping for Reality

Each person does not solely have to decide how and what he presents to the world, for that has always been part of living in a community. The contemporary reality is more complicated. Internet usage is how people get jobs, learn what is happening in the world, and even become perceivably “normal” amongst their contemporaries. The public online display of one’s private life is expected more than ever, and the attempt to show an artificially positive framework is often just a desire for the privacy that was once the norm.

The problem is that our sense of what is healthy is being distorted by the perceived need to perform or even turn oneself into a commodity. We have elevated the selling of one’s thoughts, preferences, and opinions to a type of false leadership. What we need are true leaders. We need those who do not need to craft caricatures of themselves because they are well-formed and they embody the virtues. Good leaders inspire young and old alike and provide for societal orientation.

Those who are being “followed” in our modern non-culture make for poor stand-ins in a leaderless society. They cannot bear the burden of the position. Fame and attention can be crushing, as they have always been for people in positions of prestige. The problem is that such status was once earned, and is now the reward for ridiculous and pride-filled behavior.

A society without leaders is unsteered, which is why over half of its youth would seek fame rather than greatness. We are seeing the starvation of meaning and the precluding of healthy, honest, life-giving, in-person relationships. Great men have led by their magnanimity, not by being self-obsessed or by flaunting wealth and artificial happiness. They have frequently done so by speaking Truth into a world that finds it repulsive, at great personal cost.

Notice that as one advances through the tiers, he fails to lead, not only others, but his own life. It is the ceding of every personal decision to the whims of a fickle crowd. As such, it is the opposite of leadership, for the person self-erases into what the collective would create him to be. He becomes, in a way, soulless. Living apart from true socialization and denying one’s responsibility to cultivate community is a moral failure—the cost of which we can no longer afford.

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A video of a baby born at 24 weeks can be a surprisingly divisive post. Instead of the collective urge to protect the vulnerable, a large cross-section of the populace calls for such videos to be taken down, or seeks justification for killing the child. Just the sight of such a living child is interpreted as a condemnation of abortion, because it provides witness to the reality of the child’s humanity.

Hundreds of exchanges below such videos mirror this one:

“Your ethics are different than my ethics,” is often stated as if it ends the conversation. But if taken seriously, it dissolves the very concepts being discussed. If ethics are purely personal, then words like “murder,” “care,” and even “suffering” lose any stable meaning. If he is right, then there is no truth at all. There are multiple implicit assertions in his proclamation of relativistic morality.

For example, within such a statement, it is asserted that the definition of murder and the essence of suffering are merely opinions in which a person might take any, equally valid side. This manner of thought is common to our age, and it means that not only are we almost guaranteed to talk past each other, but that we are supposed to applaud our having done so. After all, it represents a victory for individualism if each person can invent and live by his own moral code and assert it as best for him. How we could sustain a society on this concept remains unexplored.

By deciding that suffering gives us license to kill, he reduced Man into a mere product that we can terminate when it fails to perform as we desire. It is villainous to look at vulnerable people not as persons to care for but as problems to be solved. All of this is encompassed under the supposed umbrella of “ethics.”

The poster implicitly asserted that there is no reason to live apart from pleasure and the pursuit thereof—that there is no value in suffering or inherent dignity in being human. It’s an attitude that provides little counterweight to the nature of life—each of which is marked by pain and toil. We all experience loss, sickness, and suffering. Thus, it seems unsubstantiated for a person to profess the belief in a purely hedonistic meaning to life, based upon the reality that he continues to live in a world that has and will bring him pain. If our lives are not disposable, then neither are the lives of the vulnerable.

If you look at a video of a struggling infant and your first impulse is to kill him, something is awry. For too many people, what is happening is not as clear as is declared. The suffering of a child being helped in his weakness is not the real cause of alarm. The issue is that the sight of such a child plagues the consciences of those who can no longer deny the humanity of a child born 24 weeks into development.

As medical advances grow, it is inevitable that we will be able to save struggling babies at earlier and earlier ages. We will, as a society, have to come face-to-face with the reality of the children who were previously dehumanized and denied. We will have to look into their eyes. It has been said that it is easier to fool a man than to convince him that he has been fooled, but how much easier is it to convince a man to dehumanize as “clumps of cells” than to later convince him that he has applauded murder?

There’s an irony in the fact that the technological advancement that is alleged to lead us away from the ‘darkness’ of religion and the rigidity of absolute morality is eventually going to show the reality of the evil of abortion. The question is no longer whether we will see. It is whether we will admit what we see, and what that says about us.

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Do you yearn for the quiet? Not for the absence of people talking, but the absence of all noise? Perhaps it’s a bit antiquarian, but I think there’s something within us that can find absence to be healing.

What if the refrigerator stopped making its familiar whir, the AC unit span down, and every reminder of city and industry paused? If the cell phone was not there as an addiction to reach for, and every screen with their harsh blue lights would fade to black. If we could be truly at peace—not in a mythical way either, but in the manner that most people have experienced life throughout the vastness of human history.

Indulge in what feels like a guilty pleasure. Turn the phones off, light a candle or even an oil lamp, and travel back in time, not because history was perfect or because we don’t appreciate modern conveniences, but because we have souls. Sometimes, they need a break. We need to live as if we have them.

By candlelight, read something for pure pleasure, not for utility. Or pick up a real pen and write on physical paper, or simply sit before the flame and pray. Be connected with God in the silence, when you might at last hear Him.

It’s not just that our society is frenetic, but that it’s loud. It is demanding of our productivity, of our output for someone else’s ears. Even the time that people spend on social media, which they think of as pleasure, is merely the output of one’s opinions, tastes, or most sarcastic inner monologue for the entertainment of others.

The perceived need to be available, to everyone at every minute, demotes us from people with lives and loves to mere performers at the whim of the collective. The part that haunts is that there is no off switch. There is no hour wherein it is expected that people would think, or be at peace, or pray. We are wrapped in the frenzy of task-doing and task-preparation and availability for task-planning until bed when large swaths of the population toss and turn with frantic worry about tomorrow.

So if we are to live with the acknowledgement that we have souls, then intentionality is required. In a stroke of irony, we must plan for the peace. We must decide on the hour in which to light the candle. Take off the smart watch, turn off the phone or relocate it to another room, and get away from all electronics. Relearn what it is to feel and to think without being fed constant input—without being entertained. After all, we are both oppressor and oppressed in the culture of continual input, always creating and demanding more creation.

For those unfamiliar with the stillness, it can be jarring, as there’s an urge to reach for something to entertain us externally. It can feel physically uncomfortable. And therein we learn the vice that helps us to fill the noise: perhaps it’s the TV remote, where one can press a button and stare blankly, or maybe it’s the motion toward the computer so we can stare at YouTube in a similar manner. But if you sit with the silence, then contemplate that this would have been part of the typical experience prior to the Industrial Revolution. Born to a different time, what would your hobbies have been? What would you have read? Perhaps you would have prayed more, or loved better. Perhaps you would have written lengthy letters to family members across the country. Is it mere idealism to assert that you might have been more at peace?

It is not true that what is old is necessarily better, but it is the case that many of the goods of antiquity are still goods, and are worth reclaiming, if only from time to time. Before moving on to the next distraction, try lighting the candle.

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As the conflict in the Middle East swells to encompass more of the globe, largely on the basis of historic alliances, it feels somewhat similar to the opening act of World War I. This is not to suggest that we all must rush into hysteria (not that it would be productive if we did), but rather that parallels can make for interesting thought experiments.

For example, imagine if you were living through the opening of World War I and further, that you knew the devastation that would be wrought over the next few years… what would you do differently?

As an ordinary member of society with no role of power, you may find that the answer is eerily close to nothing. What’s more unsettling still is the way life’s ordinary woes would continue unabated, even as men were maimed in the trenches.

You would still need to deal with mundane sicknesses, predictable deaths, ordinary accidents, family feuds, and even workplace rivalries. It would seem so preposterous in some sense. How could your work colleague be mired in envy while her son is fighting in one of the deadliest wars the world has known? And yet, people do not cease to be human in wartime.

So while we think of the years of both World Wars as being defined by the warfare, they were also times in which ordinary people had to make routine decisions about how to live.

Knowing the devastation and the widespread cultural change that took place thereafter, would you counsel a young man in that era to go to college and thus plan a life? How about have a child? Because alongside the negative, ordinary toil that people had to endure, they also had to find ways to choose the good. Baptisms, weddings, graduations, births, and ordinary but not trivial moments of laughter took place. People chose to live, even amongst uncertainty and loss. Life could not and would not wait for them. They would continue to age whether they chose to exercise their sense of agency or not. The years would pass.

We are more in-tune with the news cycle than such people could dream of, even as they sat glued to a radio to hear updates on casualties and victories. We hear various perspectives from commentators, see footage of wartime devastation almost as it happens, and get bombarded by headlines throughout every hour, if we choose not to look away. Whether it’s a war or just the typical array of news snippets from around the world, some people find themselves so addicted to what’s happening that they forget to live themselves. Glued to a screen, they live only through the misery of others. It’s a terrible secession from joy.

Imagine if those who lived during the time of the World Wars had just stopped. If they had put a halt on every gathering, every ambition, not because of real obstacles but merely because they were too distrusting of tomorrow and too addicted to the stream of updates.

A secondary travesty would exist in that they lost things through surrender and self-erasure even while the men of the battlefield fought for victory. The events that punctuate life would have been skipped over, such that people would be living an elongated death.

Regardless of whether this becomes a larger war, we would do well not to neglect the battles that are before us as individuals. Those decisions made in the home and the family demand their own courage, and they build generations. They forge the civilization that men are willing to defend.

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Lent is now upon us, and if you’ve been to Mass recently, you probably heard some variation of, “thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” I cannot accurately speculate about what you think of during that time, but I don’t tend to focus on my own mortality, but on those whom I have already lost.

I am drawn to think of our lives as a shared journey, and one that we hope might conclude in a mutual destination. Some of our dearest friends have already departed from us. They have become that dust to which we aspire with cautious resignation. We will likely lose more still. Thus, returning to dust, which you might have last heard referenced at a graveside service, is a wound that never fully closes until we join them.

Sometimes, we can understand the last act only by reflection on the first. So we might better understand our loved ones and where they might be, by pondering their creation. For God to truly be God, for Him to create from nothing, everything that He creates must necessarily reflect Him. He did not fashion us with materials that he found from another creator, so all that we are (and our loved ones were) is indicative of Him in some way. All the Good that we can choose not only leads back to Him, but reflects Him. It mirrors Him. Just as the creations of every painter, sculptor, writer, and composer each reflect a facet of his soul, so too can people, as creations, reflect different aspects of their Creator.

Therefore, each individual can, in cooperating with God’s grace, reflect His light into the world, as they were supposed to. Those whom we have lost remind us not only of their good, but of the Goodness to whom they pointed. The best of who they were, to us and to the greater world around them, was a light that we might follow to get to the Creator who made them. In God’s mercy, it is in whose company they now share.

Potentially, as we shift to think about our own loves, souls, and deaths, we might hope that we could be remembered the same way. If only we too could be good in such a manner that people could think of us and understand our Maker better—they might love God better. Imagine if we could point the way Home, with the way we live, and the way we love.

Alas, perhaps the thought pains you as it does me, as we recognize that we are not yet who we should be. If the thought, and the failure, makes your eyes water too, take solace in another Lent in which to make those changes that will lead us to the right Destination, and point the way for others. The ashes might take on an extended meaning if we accept this season as an obligation to burn away those parts of ourselves that we know should not exist, those fragments that dim the light we are supposed to be refracting.

Godspeed on your journey. Have a blessed Lent.

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After the most recent tragic school shooting, there is a clamoring to discover the why, as perhaps we have done since the late 1990s, when these events first began happening.

The most recent shooting at Tumbler Ridge secondary school in British Columbia was enacted by a trans shooter. It’s a dynamic that we have seen repeated over the past few years. Before that, the shooters were merely described as socially inept loners.

And so we now ask: was it the trans ideology that warped his brain, the illegal drug use, the drugs that he was prescribed for depression, the content he watched, the Reddit subculture that he lived in, or something else?

Perhaps the answer can simply be a singular yes. After all, these are all indications of a loss of the good. Said differently, someone who has embraced all of these subcultures has separated himself from any connection to reality. His “friends” are depersonified in the world of the Internet. Unlike real friends, they can carefully curate the image that they put forth of themselves. His drug use and experimentation served to further sever him from his locality. Eventually, the adoption of transgenderism caused him to deny even the reality of himself.

To take the point further, imagine how unusual it would be to find out that the shooter had a healthy hobby—such as if he was actively engaged in the local tennis club, or built robots with other kids his age, or was immersed in his local church group. We never hear that. If anything, we hear about how these young men left their former activities months or years before such atrocities.

None of this is to suggest that one cannot use the Internet in positive ways, of course—it allows this work to exist. But it cannot and must not be our only source of engagement with other human beings. Using only the Internet to fulfill our social needs is like trying to hydrate with alcohol. It feels similarly wet as you drink it, but it gradually poisons you and increases your need for real water.

Over the last few decades, we have become less social with our neighbors and communities. Those who come from broken or challenging homes experience that privation even more intensely. We get some sense of who we are (especially as adolescents) from our relationships with others. Our interlocutors become a mirror through which we can view ourselves. Godless echo chambers in the recesses of the Internet can reflect a distorted image.

So many young people decided that they were transgender after immersion in Reddit and Tumblr pseudo-communities, which provide affirmation and acknowledgement at the cost of denying oneself. Then, after taking these often irreversible steps, such victims struggle to feel whole and healthy. Some are missing body parts. Haunted by a sense that something is perpetually amiss, many take their own lives. Increasingly, some become monsters who take other people’s lives.

The teenage stage that we have begun to view as typical, in which a child develops no hobbies or social interests but isolates him/herself for hours every day is a conduit to personal misery and cultural degradation. Gen Zers are fond of using the phrase “touch grass” to admonish those who have lost touch with reality because they have spent such little time in it.

We cannot fix other people’s lives, but we can form a community and build a culture around us that reflects what we should aspire to. Healthy, thriving communities and groups attract people. They heal brokenness and provide a counterweight to the despair that descends upon the victims of modernity.

The Internet may distort, drugs may numb and confuse, and ideology may deceive, but none of these abolish the will. Evil remains a choice. If we want fewer such choices, we must form souls capable of resisting them.

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This essay was published in full at Crisis Magazine, and can be read freely there. The introduction follows:

Hillary Clinton has written an op-ed for The Atlantic, which is permeated with moral indignation. She decries MAGA’s War on Empathy and then engages in a one-woman war on Truth. It may remind readers of the older rhetoric of the political left, which they don’t use as much anymore, wherein they proclaim that those on the right are immoral monsters and those on the left are heroically trying to protect the victims and institute virtuous policies.

Hillary claims that the conservative movement is morally descending. Thus, she laments the lost era of Reagan’s optimism and cheery personality, but her entire essay stands in testament to his reminder that “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

Continue reading this article at Crisis Magazine.

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The news cycle seems dominated by two very different forms of ice at the moment, like a dose of providential wit.

When a large snowstorm (or any natural disaster) looms, it becomes clear to all, as individuals, how helpless and small we are. The grocery stores quickly empty, camping supplies disappear from shelves for miles, and then we all simply hope and wait. Most of the predictions are quickly invalidated, because despite our advancements, such a disruptive part of our lives is still largely an enigma at which we can only make educated guesses.

As people burrow in their homes, waiting for the storm to strike or miss them entirely, we are most connected with prior generations. Sure, we can stock up at grocery stores beforehand, but thereafter, it’s just about hope. We are powerless against the weather. There’s a surrender inherent in the process, in which each household yields to the reality that it has prepared as much as it can.

Transportation stops, power is lost or at least feared to be unreliable, and there we might see our similarities to the man of yesteryear, who we are too quick to dismiss as lesser for his technological inferiority. In a moment just as helpless, we stand beside him.

Contemporary culture is so eager to separate us from him that it invents a “modern man” who supposedly needs different things. It is at least implicitly asserted that he must have a different essence that requires new architecture, music, and liturgy. This “modern man” is a largely unknown and little understood beast, except that he can only be fed or entertained by that which is novel. The things of the past, that time of mediocrity (on this account), cannot possibly uplift the new man.

But it’s a lie. This falsehood causes us to fail to see what has been handed on to us by past generations, to understand the debt that we have to our posterity, and to be connected with other generations by our common destination. It is in that natural connectedness that we might be better prepared for storms of all varieties, and weather them with virtue. Simply by being aware of similar battles overcome by others throughout history, we are bolstered in our own resolve. When we are isolated by the posited notion of uniqueness in struggle and in nature, we are made unnecessarily vulnerable.

What fed and sustained the souls of past generations can nourish ours today, if only we stop pretending that technological advancement is akin to interior growth; a civilization without virtue scarcely deserves the name. Our access to technology does not make us morally superior, and we are not interiorly nourished in ways disparate from those of history. Knowing that, we ought to seek out and protect the art and liturgy that sustained the men of antiquity, for our souls are not so different.

After the storm ceases and the snow on the ground shines its reflective light, there’s a kind of unmatched peace that can only exist at the end of a fulfilled hope. That’s what our forebears felt too.

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I read Lauren Southern’s book, This is Not Real Life, with much interest. In it, she chronicles the behind-the-scenes experiences that she had in the populist right movement. Those who have been watching from the outside world should be familiar with the characters: Ezra Levant, Milo Yiannopoulos, Caolan Robertson and George Llewelyn-John, Tommy Robinson, and even Andrew Tate.

I love memoirs and autobiographies, but I’ve often been mindful of the warning that if you don’t dislike the author by the end of one, then it wasn’t honest. I never developed a dislike of Lauren in reading her book, but it’s clear that she did. Her pages bleed with regret at how she handled both small and large events in her history.

Somehow, her past seems more like our past than a merely solitary adventure. The Right, to use a broad term, has been through a series of identity crises over the past 20 years—phases, if you will, as it tries to define itself by something other than the rejection of the latest propulsion toward lunacy.

We cheered when Milo went on the Dangerous Faggot Tour, warning about the perils of Islam and the need to defend the West while wearing a tight black leather outfit and bragging about his homosexual exploits. Should we? Or perhaps you remember when Gavin McInnes shoved an object up his rectum on camera in between lectures about the family unit, presumably for view counts. It didn’t seem to hurt his brand. It wasn’t merely that these figures behaved grotesquely; it was that we rewarded them for it.

Broadly, what happened throughout the populist right on camera was shadowed off-camera by even worse exploits. “Conservatism” had become a money-making brand, and it was much more interested in being outrageous (in a different way from the Left) than it was about being good.

In many ways, Lauren’s exposé therefore shouldn’t surprise us. But what it does show is the level of impact on those media figures themselves. They are affected physiologically and psychologically by the rapid pace of fame in the modern world. The effect of having a video reach 2 million views overnight, with tens of thousands of comments from strangers, will forever be unknown to most of us. But it’s not healthy, and we certainly were not made for that kind of adulation (or even criticism). Thus, anyone who meaningfully enters that world gets addicted to adrenaline and dopamine, and they chase the same audience recognition with every new production. They lose themselves in the entertainment, and they become a type of product that the populace demands more of. Because they are dehumanized as commodities, audience members become livid when the product doesn’t act as expected, such as when J.K. Rowling released books in a different genre (even though she used a pseudonym).

As members of the mob act like deranged puppeteers and the performer is reduced to a commodity who is addicted to the attention, few stop to wonder what is conservative about it all. Or even, what’s human about it?

Politics on the right has settled down a little, perhaps because so many of its heroes have been sullied, or simply because of who the President is this term. Whatever the reason, we would do well to take the quieter season to reflect on what makes a movement good, rather than merely entertaining. If behind the scenes, there are deviant parties with rampant drug use, the end result can only be dire. An outcome will reflect its production.

In more recent years, performers have been rewarded for making the most outrageous statements, regardless of truth or decency. Tucker Carlson has given a platform to Andrew Tate (after he was credibly accused of rape and human trafficking) and Nick Fuentes (after he said that rape wasn’t a big deal and defended a variety of dictators). Before the next political fever unfolds, we ought to consider what we encourage, and the cost of reducing people into spectacles before watching their predictable implosion.

If we can center our dreams for a civilization on Christ—not as a token, slogan, or figurehead, but as a person, then perhaps we can build a civilization that prizes those He came to redeem.

Lauren’s sins and regrets are not unique, but the twins of repentance and forgiveness make our faith stand apart. It’s something that sounds good on paper, especially when it applies to us, but hurts in practice, when it’s time for us to forgive as we’ve been forgiven. Without this ethos, this centering on Christ, we will merely switch out one deranged, morally unscrupulous group for another, such that we fail even in victory.

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Psst. If you enjoyed this, you can read more of my book reviews.

You’ve surely heard the quip, “Make a plan, God laughs.” We do it anyway, of course, for we cannot simply drift, which must be the opposite of the attempt to follow a plan. Yet, if we look back upon our lives, we can see how many times our expectations failed to materialize, and we were derailed by the unforeseen.

When I was an adolescent at my grandmother’s house, a repairman from the government came to fix the gas meter. I followed him around and watched him work, out of a mix of curiosity and boredom. He asked me the only question anyone knows to ask children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A lawyer,” I grinned.

“Then don’t aim to be a lawyer now. Aim to be anything else. Nobody ever becomes what they wanted to be as a kid.”

He seemed to believe that we could achieve our dreams by failing to name them. But that only tempers disappointment. It hurts less to miss a target that you didn’t aim for.

Most of us try not only to plot our next move, but every move thereafter. We struggle over the plans of our lives like we’re sitting over a chess board, guessing at our opponent’s moves when we make ours. But there’s a difference: in chess, that works. There are limited options each turn. You have only one opponent, and if you’ve played against him before, you might even know how his personality influences his playing style and the choices he makes.

Life isn’t like that. We can’t see all of the potential moves, or even the pieces that are on the board. We don’t own the board, nor can we guess at its breadth. More importantly, we don’t have to.

In chess, there is no God. In the real world, we are given the graces to handle the battles of today, but not the imaginary ones of tomorrow. We find God with us in the present, not in the mythical futures that we can create. Our attempts to plot the future can make us forget that God will be in the hereafter too — not yet, but when we arrive.

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “I don’t think I could go through that” — know that it’s because they didn’t have to. It wasn’t their cross to bear. But had it been, they would have been granted the graces they needed. That doesn’t mean that life never feels impossibly difficult, but it does mean that we’re not alone, and therefore that it’s not impossible at all.

I remember when I broke both my arms in a car accident a few years ago, people seemed befuddled anytime I smiled. I would never choose that experience, and there were frustrations and griefs galore, but there were some true joys too. I learned a new way to pray during those months, and I discovered people who would show up for me in my weakest moments. I wrote about it in more detail for National Catholic Register, but the point is that we cannot see from the outside of a dark situation what light is within it.

When we wrestle against potential futures that seem impossible to face, we invent godless chessboards that provide cause for constant turmoil and never peace, because there’s always another possibility to contemplate. And despite all of it, what we think will happen will most likely be wrong.

In all of it, cooperation with grace is a choice, and a choice that we make in the present. We co-operate by choosing to do the right thing when something else is easier. And sometimes, simply by choosing to see and focus on the good even when brokenness and pain are louder. Regardless, there’s no darkness that His light can’t reach.

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This essay was published at Crisis Magazine and can be read in full there, at no cost. (FYI: This article will be of most interest to Catholics.)

One of the measures of the success of a diocese is the number of its seminarians because they reflect a spiritual ecology. If young people are not willing to give their lives in service to God when they hear the call, then either they are not listening for it or their environment represents an obstacle. But how ought we respond when a diocese actively sabotages what was working?

The vocations initiative in the Diocese of Charlotte has been thriving for well over a decade. Under the former bishop (Bishop Jugis), dozens of young men entered the minor seminary that was built in Belmont, North Carolina. The young men who entered provided their stories in publicly available videos or via miniature biographies in the diocesan newspaper. Each young man explained how he heard the call to the priesthood, when he knew, what his family was like, etc.

Keep reading at Crisis Magazine (freely).

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This article was published in full at Catholic World Report. It may be found in full (freely) there. The introduction follows:

There is a growing ideological trend that seeks to deprive those broadly considered as being “on the right” of any and all rights, through dehumanization and the systematic exclusion from key institutions.

Most of us expect such an attitude among young college students, who have limited life experience and have not yet met the human beings with whom they disagree and about whose lives they are so cavalier. But this ideological malice is far more pervasive than that. No longer seen as extreme, we live among those who maintain a sort of nonchalant malevolence. Those who have redefined speech as violence need little help in the justification of retribution against their enemies.

I lived this reality in a small way when I was made a victim of a minor crime in an American city.

Keep reading (freely) at Catholic World Report.

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“Because of his boundless love, Jesus became what we are that he might make us to be what He is.”

— St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130 – 202)

It’s baffling to read something like that, written in the First Century. St. Irenaeus was a bishop in the early Church, before the Bible existed as a singular book and while persecution and martyrdom were expected consequences of holding the Faith. It was in that environment that such a dogma was articulated clearly nonetheless.

We consider ourselves more educated or perhaps even more intelligent than those of the past, as if the advancement of time must align with greater individual understanding. But St. Irenaeus’ world was not actually black and white, and far less of his time was spent scrolling through 30-second video reels.

The very idea that God became Man that man could partake in the Divine is something that causes most of us to ruminate at length. We struggle with it, or perhaps even wrestle against it. Yet it has been a constant feature of our Faith for 2,000 years. It is the why to Christ’s suffering and death.

If it is true, then it demands something of us. Christianity cannot be a mere spectator religion, nor a convenient sentimentality. Christ came to elevate us, and that elevation demands a conversion that makes us quiver. The enormity of the claim is why people like Polycarp were willing to accept martyrdom rather than renounce it—a fate that likely met Irenaeus too. The notion is so uncompromising that if it is true, it leaves no part of us untouched.

Perhaps the issue is not that the dogma is overly complex. It is that it disturbs our consciences. I may not know your soul, but I know my own, and I know how unworthy I am of a perfect man lifting a finger for me, never mind what He ultimately suffered for me and for you. In times like this moment, when we reflect on Christ’s birth, it is right that we might consider what we can give back in thanksgiving.

We know that grace builds on nature, and that who we are is all that we control. In other words, we cannot control God and His outpouring of grace, but we can change our receptivity and our virtuousness. By fixing ourselves, we thus become more available to be God’s instruments, to help bring the light of Christ into a darkened world. Through this, we can offer ourselves back to God, in the only gift that we can give Him. It’s a strange paradox: the only gift that we can give Him is our everything.

As we approach the day of Christ’s birth, now largely dominated by gift-giving, may we consider how to give Him the only gift we can next year.

Have a merry Christmas.

P.S. Thank you to all who make this publication possible. One-hundred people are now paying subscribers, and almost 4,000 subscribe to freely read and share these essays. I am grateful for all of you, and I hope that in at least some small way, this publication might help you to maintain your sanity in a world of uncertain, relativistic morality, and draw closer to Christ. You will all remain in my prayers throughout 2026.

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I believe very strongly in keeping alive the tradition of reflecting on one’s reading victories at the end of each year. They are indeed victories, given the ever-expanding quantity of books available, and thus how unlikely it is to put one’s hands on a gem. AI now threatens to further flood a market previously over-saturated by ghostwriters, helping to maintain the fiction that our celebrity class is literate.

I typically read between 30 and 45 books a year, depending on the length of those books and the distractions of life. At least ten are generally duds, which is to say that they didn’t change my soul. I realize that that’s a high bar, but I have no regrets. Our souls are constantly being inclined in one direction or another. If something produces nothing but a milquetoast shrug, it probably wasn’t worth interacting with at all.

That said, I adore some of the books that I read, and I find close companions in them. So, when I must choose only five, I refuse to choose favorites among them thereafter, for I do not wish to whittle further. Thus, they are provided without any order at all. All of those listed below are gems, and I consider myself grateful for having read them.

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

I read this book after listening to another one that is on this list (below), because Boethius obviously had such a profound impact on C.S. Lewis.

Imagine being on the ancient equivalent of Death Row. You were a high-ranking Roman statesman, but now you find yourself falsely accused of treason, and await a brutal death sentence. It was in that environment that Boethius wrote a masterpiece about what little we are owed, what we can know about God, and how we ought to understand the negative things that happen to us. It is, surprisingly given the circumstances of its birth, a consoling read.

The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind by Jason M. Baxter

To say that I adored this book is an understatement. The exploration of the medieval mind and the way that the ancients understood everything (time, chance, fate, etc) was invigorating. I primarily listened to it while driving back and forth to the Traditional Latin Mass on Sunday morning drives, and it seemed to be the perfect companion. There were moments in which I audibly exclaimed, “Yes!”

It alludes to Lewis as something of a Time Traveler, in that he spent so much of his energy and imagination in a time that was not his own. That is not a detraction, but a call to how we ought to be, if only because by immersion in other ages, we become aware of the errors of our own age (and hopefully immune to them).

In Praise of Prejudice: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past by Theodore Dalrymple

I enjoyed this one so much that I wrote an entire review of it, titled Judge, Discriminate, and Hold Prejudices. Read that full review, or just enjoy one of my favorite quotes from the book, which stands entirely on its own:

“Egalitarians may deny that they desire exact equality of outcome, but they have great difficulty in specifying exactly what degree of inequality is acceptable to them. That is why there are so many studies that examine inequality, whether of income or of some other marker, and why any increase in inequality is lamented as evidence in itself that an injustice has been committed. This, no doubt, is why you never see an increase in inequality praised as representing an increase in justice, as it might be—I do not say must be—if justice has anything to do with the rewards and penalties for individual conduct.”

Deadly Indifference: How the Church Lost Her Mission, and How We Can Reclaim It by Eric Sammons

If you are looking for a book that is uplifting, look elsewhere.

Truly, this was a really depressing read, but that wasn’t Sammons’ fault. It is a painful book because it chronicles how the Church shifted its messaging for the sake of ecumenism, at the expense of Catholics and Protestants alike. The rapid pace of that shift, and just how aggressively the new paradigm is parroted today, is heartbreaking. Sammons explains how “Inclusivism in theory leads to Pluralism in practice,” and why it is so important for us to fight against the narrative that has strangled the Church since the 1960s.

As a convert himself, I imagine that Eric understands the degree to which the Faith matters on the individual level, and shares in the sense of pain at the notion that we should not wish to speak this Truth into the world.

The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present by Byung-Chul Han

Byung-Chul Han is a succinct writer, whose works at times remind me of Josef Pieper. He too is a philosopher, though he keeps his Faith much quieter than Pieper, and I think a greater recognition of the Transcendent would help to make his work stronger.

In this little book, he explains how rituals bind us in time the same way that a home might bind us in place. He analyzes the (largely areligious) rituals that have become less common in contemporary life. He explains how that absence has left us feeling isolated and disconnected from not only our fellow man, but also from those who came before us.

He talks at length about the modern attempt to sell ourselves, our opinions, our looks, and everything about ourselves that would have previously been shared with one’s family and community. He laments it as a reductionism ordered toward constant production. Here’s a quote from the book:

“Values today also serve as things for individual consumptions. They become commodities. Values such as justice, humanity or sustainability are exploited for profit. One fair-trade enterprise has the slogan: ‘Change the world while drinking tea.’ Changing the world through consumption — that would be the end of the revolution. Nowadays one can purchase vegan shoes or clothes; soon there will be vegan smartphones too. Neoliberalism often makes use of morality for its own ends. Moral values are consumed as marks of distinction. They are credited to the ego-account, appreciating the value of self. They increase our narcissistic self-respect. Through values we relate not to community but to our own egos.”

Please post your own favorite books of 2025 in the comments—especially those that changed you. While I mostly read non-fiction, there is no need to restrict your selections upon that criteria.

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We are asking schools to act like prisons because we are raising children who behave like inmates. A fight at North Forsyth High School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina made headlines in recent days, because what would have once been a routine scuffle amongst teenage boys turned deadly. It was the last altercation of one boy, because a teenager drove a knife into his classmate, causing the wounded boy to stagger away for a few steps before collapsing. He died not long after.

A video of the incident is already circulating on social media, which clearly evidences the perspective of the boys who were on-scene. It only became real to them when their classmate slumped onto the floor and stopped moving. Now it is something that they will remember for the rest of their lives: evaluating where they were, what they said, and what they did or did not do.

Parents of schoolchildren in the city are now demanding that metal detectors be installed at the entrances of their schools. Thus, the trend continues: doors that only open from the inside, law enforcement on campus at all times, arrests for any violent infractions. All of it would have been confusing to parents and schoolchildren alike several decades ago. Now, we are in a perpetual arms race in which we try to protect children at their places of learning, at the expense of creating an increasingly prison-like environment. There’s a helplessness to it all—nobody actively wants the schools to feel incarcerating, but that appears to be the cost of safety.

The problem is that a society with too many unscrupulous people will necessitate an authoritarian state. Order must come from somewhere, and if it does not come from within, it must come from without. If the people are not moral, they cannot sustain a free society. Thus, a police state is required to offer a modicum of safety. This reality is being lived out in our schools.

We do not want to blame children, because they are the product of parents and external influences, but we must cast judgment upon the moral vacuousness that pervades so many schools. The issue is not that a child brought a knife to school, for it was once the norm to have gun clubs, and for students to keep rifles in their trucks for after-school hunting. Fights happened, but they were fistfights, not fatal ambushes. The difference now is that a student would bring a knife with the intent of stabbing his classmate. A modest acquaintance with the news cycle shows us that this is becoming a regular occurrence, with a variety of weapons.

Of course, the wicked culture exemplified by students is largely learned at home. Teachers who work in public and private schools tend to lament how little they can do when children come from ignoble environments. They cannot simply imbue a healthy understanding of respect, hierarchy, order, and zeal for knowledge on a student who idolizes gang culture, for example. That must begin at home.

The problem is made worse by the fact that public schools (and most private ones) do not attempt to enforce cultural standards (which would mean quickly expelling dangerous and troublesome students). In fact, the schools teach the very anti-values that make reckless indifference to life more likely, and encourage immersion in the popular culture of our age, which likewise leads to moral ruin.

The encouragement of transgender ideology in schools, for example, teaches children to be confused about the most fundamental elements of their anatomy, their function in relation to the opposite sex, their sense of purpose, and ultimately about the most common vocation of marriage. Further, school environments alienate children who are properly cultured and who are not plugged into trashy music and TV shows. Then the institutional rejection of religion is lived out as the rejection of Christianity, depriving students of staunch moral direction. If schools teach that the body is meaningless, sex is self-expression, identity is self-creation, and feelings are supreme, then objective moral norms dissolve and violence becomes just another form of expression.

In an environment of cultural homogeneity, the moral values of the home would be roughly paralleled in the schools, because those would simply be the values of the culture. This enculturation should function as a kind of herd immunity against the occasional individual who came from a difficult background, and against some evil ideologies. Yet as we have stopped enforcing cultural expectations, and instead primarily lauded “openness” and “tolerance” as our chief values, we have lost this immunity.

If the values imbued in schools promote an understanding of the body as a “flesh sack” as a YouTube commentator recently put it, and a view of life that is ordered towards acquisition and covetousness, it should not surprise us that violence has become so common and prison-like safeguards are required to keep the peace. If we want to live in more than a prison, we must create people who can live in freedom.

We must reject wholesale the perverse attitudes that have permeated so much of modern life, because we can see their result. Building a culture begins with us, and it happens in the home first. If we cannot or will not change the value system of our society, then the state will keep building more cages—metaphorical and otherwise.

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According to a 2025 Pew Research study, for every 100 Catholics who join the Church, 840 leave. This should not surprise us, because for decades the mission of the Church has been articulated in such a way that Catholics have little reason to stay. Under the auspices of ecumenism and “interfaith dialogue,” clergy and Church leadership have taught a religious indifference that amounts to self-erasure.

The mission of the Church was once clear: the salvation of souls within the Church as the “sacrament of salvation.” Over time, teaching of that foundational maxim has become tepid and convoluted such that even though the dogma has not changed, Catholic laymen believe altogether different things about salvation than they would have in 1925 or 1425 or 925…

Keep reading at New Oxford Review (scroll past the intro and my contribution is first in the list).

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Now that the FDA has officially acknowledged that children were killed as a direct result of the COVID vaccines, it seems surreal to those of us who spent so much time cautioning against the fast-track approval process, ever-broadening targeted demographics, and recommendations that were effectively mandates for so many people. The exact number will forever be elusive, as the memo itself acknowledged.

This news comes long after most people have stopped caring about the COVID saga. Only now is real, non-politicized information starting to trickle out. A cynic might remind us that the profitability of COVID vaccination has largely dried up too.

Vinay Prasad MD MPH is the Chief Medical and Scientific Officer for the FDA, in addition to being the director of CBER (the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research). His memo tells us what so many who were scorned as conspiracy theorists were deplored for saying:

“Unlike the COVID virus, which has a steep age gradient-- being at least 1000 times more likely to kill an 80 year old than an 8 year old-- myocarditis appeared to have the opposite pattern. Young, healthy boys and men-- those least likely to experience bad covid outcomes-- bore the greatest risk. The risk was as high as ~200-330 per million doses given in the highest risk demographic groups.”

Of course, medical research is constantly evolving, so in some sense, it should not be surprising that such memos would come later in time, and give us information that we did not have before. Yet—this vaccine was unlike any other medical drug or device in America.

It was forced on most of the American workforce, under threat of job loss during a time in which nobody was hiring because companies were being shut down by state governments using emergency orders. Parents took the COVID vaccine out of fear that they would not be able to feed their children if they refused. This was an experimental drug that children were pressured to take so that they could stay in school. It was imposed upon those who wanted to engage in sociable hobbies. Even volunteering to provide disaster aid required presenting a so-called vaccine passport. In some states, you could not enter restaurants without proof of vaccine status. Citizens were prosecuted for making fake documents regarding one’s personal medical decisions. Doctors lost their employment if they publicly questioned the new paradigm.

These were not medical decisions. They were infringements upon human freedom, and they represented a large-scale sociological and medical experiment on largely unwilling people. That experiment had outcomes that we will never be able to fully quantify.

It is nearly impossible to trace long-term deaths or chronic illnesses directly to vaccination, but the social damage is also profound and largely unexamined. Consider:

• Those in fields like medicine who got their degrees through spontaneous virtual programs, watching via remote videos what they should have been doing in person.

• The toddlers who missed the key developmental phase of watching human faces to learn subtle social cues.

• The teenagers whose final years in high school, known as a formative period for identity and personality, were spent in front of screens.

These are the victims that we can never number, but whose existence is undeniable.

For the first time, the FDA is admitting not only that the vaccines had negative health outcomes among people who were least likely to be at risk from COVID, but also that the agency itself ignored early indications of danger, instead choosing to continue promoting the drugs to ever-broadening demographics:

“Worse, the FDA delayed acknowledgement of the safety signal until after it could extend marketing authorization to younger boys 12-15. This is described by the Commissioner and I in JAMA. Had the acknowledgement come early, these younger boys, who likely did not require COVID-19 vaccination, may have chosen to avoid the products.”

The COVID era caused the gradual loss of public trust in the medical industry, and in government. That loss of trust was not merely the result of an exhausted populace who were tired of mask wearing—it was the net effect of the fact that people were lied to and misinformed by public officials. The public began to see themselves as victims, or at least enemies, of the very groups that were charged to protect them. Memos like this validate those concerns.

The memo (which everyone should read in full) ends with the claim that a new approach will be taken in the future with regard to vaccine approval and promotion:

“we will take swift action regarding this new safety concern, we will not be granting marketing authorization to vaccines in pregnant women based on unproven surrogate endpoints… we will demand premarket randomized trials assessing clinical endpoints for most new products… We will revise the annual flu vaccine framework, which is an evidence-based catastrophe of low quality evidence, poor surrogate assays, and uncertain vaccine effectiveness measured in case-control studies with poor methods.”

The COVID-era saw medical professionals raised as gods and the establishment itself immune from criticism, even from within. It was a horrifying display of the Scientism of our age, an ideology that treats scientific institutions as unquestionable moral arbiters. Christians who tried to worship the true God were arrested in multiple states for trying to enter their shuttered churches, yet nobody considered shutting medical clinics, or even abortion clinics, because those were considered “essential,” unlike the churches that minister to the human soul.

Because doctors are not gods and the government is not all-good, it is a positive development to have a populace that questions them, even while it represents a loss—that the naivete we once bore was a luxury that we can no longer afford.

There is a debt owed to those who were damaged by the social policies of the COVID era and those who were killed or maimed by the medical ones. Realistically, most of us can acknowledge our inclusion in at least the former category. Those policies were so widespread and drastic that they made victims out of almost everyone, except the elitists of our society. It is a period that will likely be studied for decades, as we gradually learn of the losses in numeric ways that lack humanity and cannot convey appropriate gravity. So we might use these data points better by remembering who we are as a people, and that on account of our humanity, there are policies and decisions that we should never accept. There are commands that we should never obey, for they reduce Man made in God’s image to mere obstacles in the way of bureaucrats. We must never consent to that assertion.

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