Category: Sermons
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Worldly Success and Spiritual Growth
Worldly success can easily ensnare, and most will fall into the trap. But for some, worldly success has the opposite effect: it reveals the vanity, the emptiness, of worldly success, and thus subserves spiritual advance. One is therefore well-advised to strive for a modicum of success as defined in the worldly terms of property and…
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Sunday Morning Sermon: Stay Calm
Stay calm. Take some deep breaths. Be careful what you say. Quietly prepare. If you are a Democrat, ask yourself whether Joe Biden's open-border policy might have something to do with a breakdown in civil order, and who will profit from such a breakdown. Rod Dreher's take. Victor Davis Hanson on Assassination Porn and the…
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Hyperkinetic and Hyperconnected
The typical American's life is frantic, frenetic, hyperkinetic, and hyperconnected. For any really good reason? What's the rush? Quo vadis? Whither goest thou, thoughtless hustler? From time to time we need to slow down and unplug. Try to go deviceless for a few days. Haul off to some desert spot and rest incommunicado, out of…
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Like a Moth to the Flame
Top o' the Stack: A Saturday sermon of sorts on romantic folly.
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Tongue and Pen
Top o' the Stack. Christ has harsh words for those who misuse the power of speech at Matthew 12:36: "But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment." But what about every idle word that bloggers blog and Substackers stack? Must…
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Care of Soul, Care of Body
A Sunday Substack sermon.
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Sunday Morning Sermon: A Life Well Lived
To make good use of your time in this world, think of your life above all as a quest, a seeking, a searching, a striving. For what? For the ultimate in reality, truth, value, and for their existential appropriation. One appropriates reality by being authentic, truth by being truthful, values and norms by living…
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Faith’s Immanent Value
Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably. My question is whether, and to what extent, that upshot would matter. What if there is nothing on the other side of…
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Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır
"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb) Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude. When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail. It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged…
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Memory: Content and Affect
The trick is to retain the content so that one can rehearse it if one wishes, but without re-enacting the affect, unless one wishes. Let me explain. Suppose one recalls a long-past insult to oneself, and feels anger in the present as a result. The anger is followed by regret at not having responded in…
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Mistakes
We have all made mistakes. But if we have learned their lessons, they have served a good purpose. Let us not compound our blunders by dwelling on them. Do not forget them, but do not dwell on them. Retention in memory subserves a salutary humility; to dwell on them impedes the project of one's life…
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“And the Word was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us.” (John 1:14)
Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible . . . . Read the rest here. It is a 'sermon' you will not likely hear in any Catholic…
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Master Desire and Aversion
It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires,…