“Sloth of Disobedience” (Day 1 of the Holy Rile)

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him from whom by the sloth of disobedience thou hast gone away.""Sloth of disobedience" is a phrase so unique to St. Benedict that anyone using it invariably has the old abbot in mind. Few historical figures have coined such an exact phrase to transact a perrenial concept—one that binds our civilization's continuity by naming obedience as the very possibility of tradition itself!

Read more »

Good Samaritan Sunday

In the Extraordinary Rite, today would comprise "Good Samaritan Sunday" [In the Ordinary Rite, this reading is reserved for the 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time (usually, mid-July)]:

Read more »

Relics in Acts of the Apostles!

Many scenes of the New Testament depict the Apostles as deities before the eyes of the Gentiles.  Most memorably, in Acts 14:12, Paul and Barnabas are taken as avatars of the Olympian gods:

Read more »

Hexameron (Homily I)

Please help support the mission of New Advent and get the full contents of this website as an instant download. Includes the Catholic Encyclopedia, Church Fathers, Summa, Bible and more — all for only $19.99...

Read more »

The Morality of Buying Local

On this blog, I don't often speak directly to specific moral issues (unless it instantiates a larger point about religion proper), but I can't help but think of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity could be of service in this instance:

Read more »

Data vs. Knowledge vs. Wisdom

According to a contemporary accounting information systems textbook, straightforwardly titled Accounting Information Systems, a glaring statistic haunts us: "With an incredible 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created every day, 90 percent of the world's data has been created in the last two years alone."*

Read more »