Chesterton Academy is set to open next year taking in high school students to study in the classics under the shadow of GKC.  It is the sort of news that makes this current liberal arts student with a misspent youth raise his glass that much higher!  My prayers go out to it for an exciting year.

Also, I must endorse a new favorite blog: Mr DeJack, who will head the school has started the blog War, Drink, and The Church.  It looks promising and will no doubt provide that much more Chestertonian insights.

Iraqi Christians are being faced many more bombings, and I am beginning to wonder if any candidate for President will kindly address it. It’s not enough to play the God card and hope the Evangelicals get you in, but it would also be a a sight to see if some candidate would respond to this.

For now, East and West Catholics as well as Orthodox Christians are being faced with a number of unimaginable persecutions, including a group of Dominican Nuns. The Holy Father has reached out to them, and we can only pray that peace will one day come to the oldest Christian communities in the world.

Regina Pacis, Ora Pro Nobis!

The title of this post is how Pope Benedict XVI described St. Augustine in his general audience today.  The Holy Father himself has been a tireless searcher after wisdom, and he has often used St. Augustine as a tool to chase after Truth. “All the threads of Latin Christian literature lead to Hippo,” The Pope proclaimed!

With that fine announcement, I suppose it’s time to announce to you, my constant reader, that I shall be pursuing the great saint as my Junior Project at Thomas More College!  Keep me in your prayers, and I warn ye that it may be a while before I blog again! 

While the Which Church Father Are You Quiz isn’t a mark of Orthodoxy, I can help but to take the following results with a little fear:

Pray for me constant reader!

Thanks to the power of YouTube, I was fortunate enough to find sound recordings  of GK Chesterton.   Odd, but he sounded exactly like I expected him.  (HT: gmdinformation)

New from ByzCath News: “The Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church has authored an article for L’Osservatore Romano arguing that an end to clerical celibacy would not resolve the vocations crisis.”

This coming from a man who heads a rite where men have always been permitted to be married prior to becoming a priest, which is also having a vocations crisis in America.  Only love, it seems, produces vocations and we must find that part of the psyche that brings about love.

…when I will cease to write about politics.  However I have some advice for Ron Paul supporters, and other supporters whose candidates are a bit of a long shot.  I understand that it is frustrating when your suit isn’t getting the support they deserve and the irritation of the having to fight an uphill battle with the media.  I was a little crazy once, and was idealistically part of the Libertarian Party for quite  a length of time and certainly recall the irritation of getting nowhere in campaigning.  Nonetheless, how you respond to the calamities of politics is what will help you save face.  With that I offer one bit of advice to fight the good fight and still keep the image: don’t be whiny, and don’t play the victim. 

Win or loose, politics is a messy business that offers few joys.  Your candidate may loose the caucus, and if you whine about it you shall loose all future support in a rebound.  Likewise, the victim-complex is a particularly annoying trait that has not worked well for underdogs in the past and is unlikely to work in at this point.

St. Thomas More, pray for us!

Boy glues hand to bed to avoid school (Yahoo News)

It seems everyone, including myself, is as giddy as a school girl going to prom over Mike Huckabee’s use of Chesterton in his victory speech.  Mr. Huckabee joins the ranks of men like Gandhi, Michael Collins, and Mussolini as a class of varied politicians who use Chesterton’s great words. 

May I also recommend another fine line from Chesterton for Huckabee and indeed all politicians?  Keep in your heart these words, “The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.”