If you had to guess the characteristic vice of our age, what would you pick? Some might say lust, and that’s certainly a big one, but it doesn’t seem to get to the root of the problem. The safe choice, perhaps, would be pride. It’s certainly true, but the same could be said of...

In a recent interview, Alejandro Monteverde, the director of the new movie Cabrini, defends his work against those who have criticized it for portraying St. Frances Xavier Cabrini as a strong woman and social worker with little to no reference to God, prayer, her religious vocation, or the...

The Shepherd (or Pastor) of Hermas, an important second-century Christian text, is categorized as an apocryphal apocalypse; it consists of a series of visions urging repentance and penance in preparation for the end times. It contains of three books containing five Visions, twelve...

The Didache One of the most important sources from the age of the Apostolic Fathers is “The Lord’s Teaching through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations,” commonly referred to by its short name, the Didache (Greek for “teaching”). While the Didache was lost until the...

After I saw Cabrini, the new biopic of the great missionary saint who served the immigrant poor in New York, I perused some other Catholic reviews of the film, and something struck me as odd. The reviewers seemed to admit, tacitly or explicitly, what I observed in my own viewing: the film contains...

Sometime towards the end of the first century A.D., two men made a journey from Rome to Corinth. Claudius Ephebus and Valerius Vito, a pair of freed slaves from the household of the deceased Emperor Claudius, carried a letter to the Christian community in Corinth from Bishop Clement of Rome...

The New York Times Magazine has given some much-needed attention to ISIS's genocide of Christians with a long essay by Eliza Griswold: "Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?" In First Things

In the past, I’ve listed my favorite films I saw for the first time in the last year along with my books in the article on that topic. This time, I have decided to give the movies their own article for the sake of space. As you may know, I co-host Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast with...

The Clash is one of those bands you’re almost guaranteed to have heard whether you know it or not. The seminal English punk act made a dent in the rock music scene in 1977 with their first, self-titled album, featuring a simple, aggressive style with political lyrics, exemplified by songs...

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah lets us know within the first thirty seconds that it isn’t a literal translation of the Biblical account. In the course of a text opening that quickly recounts the story of Eden, the fall of Adam and Eve, and Cain’s murder of Abel, we learn that Cain and...