Start getting those Lent meals planned! Here’s a late 19th-century gem from England that I found scanned and uploaded one day: Cookery book for fasting and abstinence days. Eel Pie for the very brave, and Macaroni Pie (baked Mac’n’Cheese) for the rest of us! Although the variety of cookery books at present in circulation is…
Happy New Year–today’s the perfect day to talk about calendars, of course! If you’ve got a young family, you won’t want to miss the wonderful work done by Michaela Harrison, a Catholic wife and mother living near–and very inspired by!–Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma. Even if you don’t have children at home, your own faith…
Any study of late medieval religion must begin with the liturgy, for within that great cycle of fast and festival, of ritual observance and symbolic gesture, lay Christians found the paradigms and the stories which shaped their perception of the world and their place in it….In the liturgy and the sacramental celebrations which were its…
The fundamental fact about the liturgical year is that it is a sanctification of time. Certain key events in the history of salvation, and certain key elements of faith, have become attached to certain dates of the calendar like gems on a bracelet. This bracelet is like a magnificent rosary. We cannot handle it without…
We recently celebrated a Nameday for a family member–great fun! Namedays are very happy days for little ones. A nameday is the feast day of the saint for whom a person is named (assuming, of course, that when he was baptized he was given a Christian name). Until he is old enough to receive the…
I majored in psychology. It was fortuitous that around the time I was in college, the sub-field of “Positive psychology” was coming to the fore. Like many people, I am much more interested in the good things about life than the bad things, and it was energizing to study experimental data on people that were…
Some people think of so-called Traditionalists as grumpy, nerdy, elitist, conspiracy-theorists who want to imprison other Catholics in the dreaded Middle Ages. The term “Traditionalist” describes those Catholics that value the “smells and bells,” that is, the fullness of Catholicism expressed in teachings and morality, traditions and prayers, and in the celebration of the liturgy. It’s really not scary and weird like people think.
I have a small ambition: I really want to change the world. I want to save it–or at least, the souls in it. I want to help rebuild and restore Christian culture. Are you with me? Of course, it’s an immense undertaking that will likely take millions of people, generations of effort, and a constant outpouring of God’s abundant…
All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle. –St. Francis of Assisi Lately I’ve had to go on a media fast (again)–the darkness out in the world just seems too oppressive at this moment, and the evil on every front seems poised to swallow us all up. But–now is when…
Supposedly some of the names of the days of the week in the English language are derived from the names of Norse gods. (This has always fascinated, rather than annoyed, me.) We must live each of these days in a Christian way, however, and one great way to do that is to observe the tradition of Christian…
St. Catherine Catholic Culture Center 