Free Republic

NOVEMBER 15, 2020 FROM THE PASTOR Several of our Lord’s parables have to do with productivity in one form or another: The Sower, The Mustard Seed, The Tares, and then there is today’s, which is specifically about money (Matthew 25:14-30). In Greek currency, a talanton, as a measure of silver, was the equivalent of 6,000 Roman denarii. Establishing modern equivalences of money is notoriously difficult, but since a single denarius was worth a day’s wages, the value of a talent was great. This parable is about more than wealth management. In English, the word “talent” is an insightful pun, because...

As a psychosis, “self-mutilation syndrome” is rooted in self-loathing and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Whole cultures can be afflicted with a similar compulsion to injure themselves. Nowadays it is called a “cancel culture.” To topple statues and burn churches is a metaphor for self-loathing rather than reason. In their modern aesthetic recklessness, nations begin to disdain what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.” Even people who do not read much still can see much, and they can see that destruction of great buildings is the grammar of self-mutilation. There was a sigh of relief when the French...

Column: From the Pastor Geniuses often are thought to be absent-minded. Archimedes was so preoccupied with a mathematical diagram he was constructing during the invasion of Syracuse in Sicily in 212 BC, that he told a Roman soldier about to slay him: “Let me finish my numbers.” He was not professorially absent-minded, but present-minded. His obligation to truth took precedence over life itself. In our exceptional times, the President has declared a national emergency. This is not unprecedented, and I have an oral tradition of my own family witnessing to the influenza epidemic of 1918, when my grandparents’ venerable parish...

Being a New Yorker, I only go to the top of the Empire State Building about once every thirty-five years, and I have been to the Statue of Liberty just twice. Merely once in my life have I welcomed the new year in Times Square, and I had the impression that I was the only New Yorker in the crowd. As for the opera, people who live here boycott it under its present management, and I have never shopped in Macy's, even though it is practically next-door. Only one time, as a child, did I see the Easter show...

The Supreme Court’s abuse of its authority in the decision redefining marriage as an institution based on feelings rather than fact and sanctioning deviancy as a civil right was expected, but the surprise was its sentimental substitution of nihilistic narcissism for jurisprudence, expressed in an amorphous substitute for English diction. This passed a death sentence on Christian culture, just as Roe v. Wade sanctioned the deaths of millions of infants. As Christ rose from the dead, so can our nation, but only the cynic and the naïf will deny that the next steps will be attacks on Christ himself in...

Christ's temptation and oursFATHER GEORGE WILLIAM RUTLERChrist was tempted three times as an act of love to prepare his Church for three temptations which would assault her in every generation. The Spirit that "drove" Jesus into the desert to be tempted by Satan (Mark 1:12) is the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the bond of love between God the Father and God the Son. Christ was tempted three times as an act of love to prepare his Church for three temptations which would assault her in every generation.Satan tested Christ to figure out if he truly was...