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.

The cross is Jesus going into the very lair of death. He goes to meet head-on that which frightens us the most. And what does He do? He battles it. He engages it. And finally he conquers it.

Both total accommodation to the culture and total resistance to it are usually signs of intellectual sickness.

Catholicism is a matter of the body and the senses as much as it is a matter of the mind, precisely because the Word became flesh.

The human race is one big dysfunctional family.

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.

Love without truth devolves into sentimentality. Truth without love becomes cold and calculated.