Michael Pakaluk: Seeing with fresh eyes

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 28, 2025 | In Reviews

You might say that Michael Pakaluk has a strange way of looking at things—by which I mean that he consistently raises the kinds of questions about the realities of life that most of us never think about. The result is a greater depth of penetration into many topics that leads to increased understanding—that is, a firmer grasp on reality. This quality is consistently on display in the fifty essays in his new book from Ignatius Press, The Shock of Holiness, which is subtitled “Finding the Romance of Everyday Life”.

When I’m reading a book for potential review, I place blank Post-it notes on the pages which contain some flash of insight or particular turn of phrase that I want to be able to look at again later. I soon learned that, in this case, the notes wouldn’t prove very useful as distinctive markers: There were just too many of them. Michael Pakaluk consistently raises interesting questions about the many realities we take for granted, while offering answers that make it nearly impossible to take these realities for granted any longer. When most of these are spiritual questions, and when the answers put the reader in touch with what we might call Ultimate Reality in new and interesting ways, we end up with a book that is as delightful as it is profound.

Brevity as the soul of wit

Perhaps the greater miracle, where scholars and especially philosophers are concerned, is that this book is also refreshingly brief. I myself am a past master at wearing out my welcome when expounding on any topic. Many of my own readers have asked me why I couldn’t I have said what I wanted to say in half the space. With Michael Pakaluk, you might occasionally wonder why some particular aspect of reality caught his attention at all, but you will never wonder why it took him too many words to offer his insight.

Indeed, for Pakaluk, a good essay is a short essay, usually not much more than a thousand words, or about the same length as this post. He’s been writing them on The Catholic Thing for years. Most of these essays appeared there first, though they have been edited to make a more cohesive collection. Certainly it is a far greater pleasure to have so many of the best collected as a book, especially such an intriguing, warm, and joyful fireside sort of a book.

Unlike Caesar’s Gaul, The Shock of Holiness is divided into five parts, in which the author reflects in a great variety of ways on “The Romance of Daily Life”, “Shock of Holiness”, “Mary and Joseph”, “Sex and Marriage”, and “Life and Manners”. To take just a few examples:

In the first section, in an offering entitled “The Fullness of Time”, Pakaluk considers that the Passion of Christ was deliberately offered as a kind of sacrament—that is, as a sign of “both the gravity of sin and the depth of God’s love”. In the second section, he reflects on Saint Jean de Brébeuf’s two martyrdoms and on “What St. Thomas Aquinas Did Not Say”, offering perspectives that almost guarantee an element of surprise.

In the third section he probes the meaning of Mary as “Singular Vessel of Devotion” and describes “God’s Instrument for Viewing the Crucifixion”. In the fourth he considers such things as the relationship between “Contraception and Our Abdication of Fatherhood”. And in the fifth, he reflects on how depressing is “The Merely Human Condition” with a decisive frankness that provides a badly needed perspective on both our own weakness and our Savior’s understanding:

And then at the end of the day, you will find that your best efforts, although necessary, are not sufficient, and that certainly thinking, purpose, resolution, good intentions—all fail in the battle and count as if for naught. And it will be something simple, material, and fleshly, like holy water, a vocal prayer, or a priest’s anointing, that will prove your salvation. [p. 194]

A final insight

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of Pakaluk’s insights is that, for most of us much of the time, they will make their appearance all unexpected. They typically do not arise from the way we ordinarily look at things but from the way in which we ordinarily don’t. In this he shares that wonderful Chestertonian quality of being able to turn the whole world on its head so we can understand that it is really only Christ who is upright. Or, to use an image Chesterton actually crafted into one of his poems, reflecting on a picture of Mary hanging on a wall: The picture appears to be crooked but we gradually realize it is really perfectly straight—for it is the whole house that is askew.

An example of this is found in the forty-third essay in the book, “Heresies of Presumption”. Here Pakaluk notices that the entire modern world tends to presume that the goods Catholics enjoy are available to everyone, “just as a basic fact, rather than solely as a consequence of the sacrifice of Our Lord.” This causes them “to get all mixed up about the uniqueness of Christianity”. Thus so many people believe that they have direct access to God any time, and that they can turn to Him at any time to ask for help, “as if He is waiting only to converse with me, no matter my faults.”

But Pakaluk notices that to everyone outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, this notion that God is just waiting for us to accept his love is entirely foreign. And yet today we find that “false philosophies have promised or inspired something similar.” He continues:

Most obvious would be those who say that God is within each of us, or a fragment of God, or maybe even that, simply by being created, we are identical with God or united with Him. Descartes, for instance (to take one of the less egregious cases), seemed to have believed that the very essence of God was represented in the human soul and that we need do no more than peer within to see that, by necessity, He exists…. More recent philosophies of radical autonomy seem to suppose implicitly that we are gods. [p. 197]

But if we trace these broadly cultural notions back, we find that they actually have their roots in Christianity, and Christianity alone. We still believe in human fulfillment and, above all, human progress. But we never think to ask about the origins of these historically unusual ideas. It is the genius of Michael Pakaluk, in all of these essays, that he does not forget to ask.

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Michael Pakaluk, The Shock of Holiness: Finding the Romance of Everyday Life: Ignatius Press, 2025. 227pp. Paper $18.95; Ebook $12.32.