In a way, fasting is like the "calming of the monkey mind" effected by the rosary prayer: both are means of stilling the effervescence of relatively superficial preoccupations.

God is a placebo for your own mortality.

Christ's invitation to the priesthood is an invitation to a way of life that is athletic in its intensity and heroic in its form.

The great danger of the new media is that it seems to relish the superficial. There has been an ethos within the Church for many years to pursue an accommodationist strategy in regards to the culture, and this has resulted in a public presentation of the Faith that is often nebulous or "dumbed down."

Easter is an earthquake, an explosion. If you see it as less than that, you're not getting it.

Again, I hear almost everyday from atheists who write off religion as primitive, premodern nonsense. I summon Aquinas, Augustine, Paul [of Tarsus], Teresa of Avila, Joseph Ratzinger, and Edith Stein-in all their intellectual rigor-as allies in the the struggle against this dismissive atheism.

We are exceptionally good at seeing the faults in others and exceptionally adept at ignoring the faults in ourselves.