“Fr. Paul D. Scalia: ‘Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me.’ Perhaps we can hear in these words an invitation to couples to have more children. The young G.K. Chesterton once wrote a bit of doggerel that captures his love of the Christ-child and of childhood in general: ‘I would say to all parents/ Do you take things equally/ How do you know that you are not/ In the place of Joseph and Mary.’ Of course, those two things are profoundly related. Childhood wasn’t valued until God became a child. The ancient world didn’t have the same affection or sentimentality for children that we have. In both Aramaic and Greek, the word for child was the same as for servant. It’s not that the world thought children were delightful, and so God became a child. It’s rather that by becoming a child, God sanctified childhood and children.”

Start of email from The Catholic Thing Sept. 22, 2024

“Why should this [the inherent implausibility of the message, and the regular severe physical abuse he suffered for preaching it] have persuaded anyone in Galatia to accept the truth of Paul’s message? To abandon the cult of the Caesars was not merely to court danger, but to risk the very stitching that held together the patchwork society of the province’s cities. Yet some, for all this, did find the new identity proclaimed by Paul not a menace, but a liberation. The love felt by the Jewish God for his chosen people – so unlike anything displayed by the heedless gods of Galatia – had long aroused in Gentiles emotions of envy as well as suspicion. Now, by touring cities across the entire span of the Roman world, Paul set himself to bringing them the news of a convulsive upheaval in the affairs of heaven and earth. Once, like a child under the protection of a tutor, the Jews had been graced with the guardianship of a divinely authored law; but now, with the coming of Christ, the need for such guardianship was passed. No longer were the Jews alone ‘the children of God’. The exclusive character of their covenant was abrogated. The venerable distinctions between them and everyone else – of which male circumcision had always been the pre-eminent symbol – were transcended. Jews and Greeks, Galatians and Scythians: all alike, so long as they opened themselves to belief in Jesus Christ, were henceforward God’s holy people. This, so Paul informed his hosts, was the epochal message that Christ had charged him to proclaim to the limits of the world. ‘The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“On one thing, at least, the emperor and the apostle [Paul] were agreed: in a world newly touched by the divine, nothing could be quite as it had been before. Nero, as the son of a god and the ruler of the world, was not bound by the drab and wearisome conventions that govern the affairs of mortals. Instead, like some figure sprung from tragedy, he killed his mother; he kicked his pregnant wife to death; he was married, dressed as a woman, to a man. Such it was to live as a hero of myth. What, in a city ruled by a superhuman figure, were mere proprieties? Rome itself was rendered complicit in their repeated and spectacular subversion. In the summer of AD 64, a great street party was thrown to celebrate the new order of things. And the very heart of the city, the lake was filled with sea-monsters. Along its edge, brothels were staffed with whores ranging from the cheapest streetwalkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For a single night, to the delight of the men who visited them and knew that the women were forbidden to refuse anyone, there was no slave or free. ‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’ Yet out in the vast sprawl of the capital, in the apartment blocks and workshops of the largest city in the world, there were scattered communities of people who, and their rejection of conventions and norms, put even Nero in the shade. Paul was not the founder of the churches in Rome. Believers in Christ had appeared well before his own arrival there. Nevertheless, the letter that he had sent these Hagioi from Corinth, a lengthy statement of his beliefs that was designed as well to serve as an introduction to ‘all in Rome who are loved by God’, was like nothing they had ever heard before. The most detailed of Paul’s career, it promised to its recipients a dignity more revolutionary than even any of Nero’s stunts.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

In my latest National Post column I say Prime Minister Mark Carney and Foreign Minister Anita Anand prattling on cue about a “two-state solution” in the Middle East on the anniversary of Oct. 7 demonstrates that they are so clueless they have no clue that they are clueless.

“There is always a temptation to explain great events in terms of great ambitions, but the truth about Stalingrad might be much simpler. In the orders of 23 July Stalingrad was only one among many other targets and aims. It had no obvious priority over the others. It might be that the first failure to capture the city led to reinforcements being sent to make a second attempt, which also failed. More reserves were then fed into counteract the earlier failures. In this way more and more men and resources were pushed in piece by piece until the battle took on a priority of its own, quite divorced from the actual value of the supposed target. Prestige and stubbornness became the reason for the battle to continue, not the capture of Stalingrad itself. It would not be the first time such a thing had happened. The great Battle of Gettysburg that decided the American Civil War was another example. A Confederate regiment had gone to the town to capture a shoe factory, because they were short on footwear. Before they could get the shoes they were driven out by a Unionist division. The Confederates called up reinforcements and counterattacked, causing the Unionists to summon their own support. Before long the two main armies were locked in a deadly combat that neither had foreseen and neither wanted. It seems that much the same thing happened at Stalingrad.”

Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination

“a high priest of the debunked Davoisie”

Conrad Black in National Post February 14, 2026 [re Mark Carney but the term applies far more widely and as far as I know originated with Black in this column].

“In 1550, in a debate held in the Spanish city of Valladolid on whether or not the Indians were entitled to self-government, the aging Bartolomé de las Casas had more than held his own. Who were the true barbarians, he had demanded: the Indians, a people ‘gentle, patient and humble’, or the Spanish conquerors, whose lust for gold and silver was no less ravening than their cruelty? Pagan or not, every human being had been made equally by God and endowed by him with the same spark of reason. To argue, as Las Casas’ opponent had done, that the Indians were as inferior to Spaniards as monkeys were to men was a blasphemy, plain and simple. ‘All the peoples of the world are humans, and there is only one definition of all humans and of each one, that is that they are rational.’ Every mortal – Christian or not – had rights that derived from God. Derechos humanos, las Casas had termed them: ‘human rights’.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“A decolonized university is no university at all.”

Michelle Stirling  “Dr. Frances Widdowson's Arbitration Review – Phoenix from the Ashes” on her Climate of Hope Substack February 7, 2026 [https://michellestirlingg.substack.com/p/dr-frances-widdowsons-arbitration].