“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

“Our educational authorities have already made sure that the system is rigid without making sure that it is right. They have already achieved universality but not unity. They have arranged to teach history without considering what history teaches; they have obtained powers of compulsion for teaching the truth to everybody; and then, looking into their own minds, have found that the truth is not in them.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 12, 1920 as a header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“Words matter. They are the vessels that carry moral meaning across generations. When they are stretched beyond recognition, they do not become more powerful; they become useless. That is why the recent spectacle surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – now casually accused of committing ‘genocide’ – demands serious attention. Not because the charge is credible, but because it reveals how far public discourse has descended into moral inflation and historical amnesia. The most disturbing element of this phenomenon is not found on fringe social-media platforms, but in mainstream conversation—amplified by prominent voices and repeated without shame. When enforcement of immigration law in a constitutional democracy is labeled ‘genocide,’ the word itself ceases to mean what it once did. And that loss is not academic. It is catastrophic. The term genocide was coined to describe the deliberate, systematic annihilation of an entire people. It was meant to capture the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust and other acts of mass extermination. It refers to death camps, mass graves, starvation, forced sterilization, and the total erasure of a people’s existence. It does not refer to border enforcement, deportation proceedings, or the execution of court-ordered removal. Yet today, this distinction is treated as pedantic – almost offensive. Emotion has replaced definition. Outrage has replaced precision…. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz did not merely echo the claim that ICE enforcement constitutes ‘genocide.’ He compared the fear of young people whose families are in the country illegally to Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager hunted by the Nazi state and ultimately murdered in Bergen-Belsen. This is not historical illiteracy; it is moral obscenity. Anne Frank was hiding from a government committed to the total extermination of her people. ICE is enforcing immigration law in a constitutional democracy – often against individuals who have already received due process and removal orders. To equate lawful immigration enforcement with the machinery of Auschwitz is to empty the Holocaust of its meaning and to weaponize Jewish suffering for contemporary political theater. It is precisely this collapse of moral scale—where everything disliked becomes ‘genocide’ and every fear becomes Anne Frank—that makes serious conversation impossible and turns historical memory into a blunt instrument rather than a solemn responsibility. This is not merely offensive to Jews. It is dangerous to society at large. When the Holocaust becomes a metaphor rather than a historical event, it loses its power to warn. If Anne Frank is everyone, then she is no one.”

The Times of Israel blog by Benjamin Blech [the Times explicitly takes no authorship or responsibility for its blogs] Feb. 5, 2026 [https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-ice-became-the-gestapo/].

“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

“Starting in Galilee in the 1730s, a Bedouin sheikh, Zahir al-Umar al-Zaydani, carved out a norther fiefdom, which he ruled from Acre, its Crusader ruins rebuilt as his palace, the effective capital for the next century. It was the only time, except short-lived rebellions, when a native Palestinian Arab ruled an extended part of the Holy Land.”

Simon Sebag Montefiore Jerusalem: The Biography A History of the Middle East

“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

“The word Filistini – Palestinian – had first been used in 1898 by the short story writer, Khalil Beidas, in an introduction to a Russian guidebook of the Holy Land; in 1908, a former Ottoman official Najib Azouri suggested the expansion of Jerusalem Sanjak to include the southern parts of the Beirut Vilayat: ‘the progress of the land of Filastin depends on this.’”

Simon Sebag Montefiore Jerusalem: The Biography A History of the Middle East

“Whatever men have rightly said, no matter who or where, is the property of us Christians.”

Origen, who applied long-established scholarly methods of understanding ancient texts to Biblical ones, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World