Free Republic

It was July in 2016, and Holland was in the northern Iraq city of Sinjar. He had arrived with a BBC film crew about three months after ISIS, the murderous jihadist group, had tried and failed to retake the town after massacring members of the Yazidis, an ancient religious and ethnic minority in Iraq. Holland knew something about ancient history. He was an award-winning British historian who had written popular books about ruthless Spartan and Roman leaders he called the “apex predators” of the Greco-Roman world. They lived by the Athenian dictum: The strong do what they can and the...

the life of Japanese sculptor Etsuro Sotoo offers a striking witness to how stone itself can become a path to faith. For Sotoo, whose decades of carving at Spanish Barcelona’s Basilica of the Holy Family, known as Sagrada Familia, have shaped one of the world’s great sacred spaces, the slow, humbling work of sculpting stone ultimately led him to encounter the God whom Antoni Gaudí — Sagrada’s iconic architect — served, and to enter the Catholic Church through baptism. . Studying the life and vision of Sagrada’s legendary architect — and a spiritual giant — not only shaped his artistic...

The number of candidates preparing to be received into the Catholic Church across England at Easter is at its highest level for 15 years. Dioceses across the country are reporting increases, with Shrewsbury Cathedral holding an additional service to accommodate record numbers of adults seeking baptism and admission into the Church. In a statement, the Diocese of Shrewsbury said: “The numbers of people asking to become Catholics in the Diocese of Shrewsbury – which includes all of Shropshire, Cheshire, the Wirral and parts of Greater Manchester – has almost doubled in the past three years. “The surge in new converts...