'Whence comes this restraint?'
'From liberty, my Lucio, liberty.'

Let's suppose you are a librarian in 1924. You take for granted that your job is to provide people with access to good books of a variety of sorts. You also take for granted that smut is out, and that children are…

The Church, says Saint Paul, is the body of Christ, and the most obvious thing about a body, the thing that Paul himself elucidates, is that it is characterized by both equality and hierarchy.

The foot is a member of the body no less than is the hand, the heart, the ears, or the…

Dante thought about the odd fact that when Peter and John ran to the tomb of Jesus, John got there first, as we'd expect the younger man to be fleeter afoot, but he did not enter. He waited for the elder, Peter.

The poet attributed that haste to John's greater love, and in fact…

Dostoyevsky, Mauriac, Bernanos, Undset, Flannery O'Connor...

The test of compassion is what you do for people you find appalling. I don't mean, here, people whom you judge to be in a state of sin.

Everybody's a sinner, and, if the truth be told, in every culture, among every…

Jesus invited the rich young man to come and follow him, after he had sold all he had and given the money to the poor. That must have stunned the disciples. Jesus did not set that condition for everyone. The willingness to do so -- absolutely; our hearts are to be his alone.

So…

One of the telltales of a faithful witness is that he doesn't put himself forward, like a 'ciarlatano,' the Italian for 'chatterbox,' a con man who does a lot of slick talking; English CHARLATAN.

Another is that he doesn't overdetermine things. If you have two witnesses with…

When Jesus met the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and they did not recognize him, he asked them what they were talking about, and why they were so DOWNCAST.

The word that Luke uses, skythropoi, is used only one other time in the New Testament. It's when Jesus advises his…

When John says that if everything that could be said about Jesus were written down, the whole world could not be room enough for the books, we are apt to think of it as a pious exaggeration. We should think again.

Take for example when Jesus says to Martha, 'Your brother shall…

'This is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it.'

youtube.com/watch?v=jiCLZp…

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavor?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.

A blessed Easter to all!

Today is Holy Saturday.

Today is the dead time between the death of Jesus and his resurrection. 'Descendit ad inferos,' says the creed. INFEROS means, literally, the lower regions: cf. the preposition INFRA, below.

'Facilis descensus Averno,' says the Sibyl to Aeneas, who has…

There is a play on words in the Greek of Saint Paul that can't come across in English. I'll try to translate to bring it out:

For I have taken from the Lord what I have handed over to you, that on the night when the Lord Jesus was handed over, he took bread...

That's really…

And the World Knew Him Not, by Anthony Esolen open.substack.com/pub/anthonyeso…

It puzzles me, when I think of how wealthy we are, how powerful our tools are, and how readily available are materials for building and adorning, that our cities are so dreary, blank, and even ugly. It is as if an evil wind had blown through the land and scoured out of the human…

For your Holy Week reading: Riccardo Bacchelli, Lo Sguardo di Gesu (The Gaze of Jesus), translated by Somebody, for Ignatius Press. A stunning and unforgettable treatment of the times and of the trial and execution of Christ.

Bacchelli is in the first rank of Italian novelists.…

We're running an Easter special at Word and Song -- all subscribers get a LOT of material -- 5 articles a week, with links to films and music and art; and paid subscribers get even more, such as what's below:

Bartimaeus, by Anthony Esolen open.substack.com/pub/anthonyeso…

A literary translator needs to be an expert in the language he is translating from; that goes without saying. But what's often overlooked is that he must excel as a writer, a reader, and an interpreter of the language INTO which he is translating. He must be aware of a variety of…

The flip side of committing poems to memory happens when a single line or a couplet can bring back your sense of the whole poem, even if it's not the entire work you've gotten by heart. So then:

I tell the tale that I heard told:
Mithridates, he died old.

A Robin redbreast in…

One of my contacts here has asked me which poems ought to be included in an anthology of Poems to Memorize. Here goes, in no certain order:

Hamlet's soliloquy, 'To be or not to be'
Antony's speech to the crowds
Prospero, 'Ye elves of hills'
Song from As You Like It: 'Blow,…

Somewhere in the Federalist, Madison -- reversing his previous position -- says that as any group of legislators grows larger, its capacity to be a deliberative body decreases and its danger of becoming a mob increases, so that, even if every Athenian citizen had been as wise as…

I have just learned how our old pastor, Father Richard Bucci, passed away:

Death by knee replacement, leading to sepsis. In one day, dead the next.

A close relation and I used to argue about whose profession was more corrupt. I insisted it was mine, she insisted it was hers.…