A ‘perfect’ chocolate chip cookie and the chef who created it [scroll to end of article for recipe]...

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”...
John Cuddeback
I wonder what features were typical of ‘useless houses’ in Athens. Did they have the ancient equivalent of a state-of-the-art entertainment center dominating the family room, or a master bath big enough to host a luncheon? Was it that size, number, and arrangement of rooms did not reasonably correspond to real human life of the household community?

Surprise! There’s a secret organ in your head — the first new one scientists have found in 300 years...

Lessons from the life and legacy of Blessed Karl, the last Habsburg emperor...
K.V. Turley
Sometimes it is hard to believe that saints were once flesh and blood: So often we see church statues of the blessed that look unreal. Harder still is it to recall that some of these saints had children and that today their descendants are living, breathing men and women. St. Gianna Molla is one such example. His Imperial Royal Highness Imre von Habsburg-Lothringen, archduke of Austria...

Is this the end of the College of Cardinals as a polite society?
John Allen
By tradition, both the United States Senate and the College of Cardinals have been a sort of Country Club in which members, whatever their disagreements, treat one another with courtesy. That culture of civility disintegrated long ago in the Senate, and if Cardinal Joseph Zen has anything to do with, it may not be long-lived in the Church either...

Video: Amazing animation showing how ingenious medieval engineers built the Charles Bridge in Prague...

Thomas Howard and the wonder of our earthly and heavenly homes...
Noelle Mering
The widely beloved author and professor Tom Howard has gone on to his eternal rest. He rose to prominence in Evangelical circles in the late 1960s with his book Christ the Tiger (1967), then entered the Anglican Communion before he finally, as he explained, “read his way into the Catholic Church.” News of his becoming Catholic in 1985 was monumental enough to justify a three-part series analyzing it in Christianity Today, the flagship Evangelical magazine in North America...

Cardinal Zen on Cardinal Parolin: “Parolin knows he himself is lying. He knows that I know he is a liar. He knows that I will tell everyone that he is a liar”...

On the wickedness that withers and the truth that perdures...

4 issues on the table for Pope Francis and the future of the Church...
Andrea Gagliarducci
Until now, Pope Francis appears to have escaped the criticism and attacks levied against the Church. Even when it comes to the recent Vatican financial scandals, Pope Francis’ name is never mentioned. It is strange since the Pope, though he never took any responsibility for what happened, always presented himself as a guarantor, a leader committed to clarify and solve the most difficult situations...

God and God alone — A homily for the 29th Sunday of the Year...

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone says prayers of exorcism at protest site where statue of St. Junípero Serra was toppled...

Flannery O’Connor is an antidote to our own unraveling...

This Sunday, Jesus makes both parties angry (and so should we)...
Tom Hoopes
Jesus is confronted with a partisan trap in the Gospel this Sunday, the 29th Sunday of Ordinary Time. To get out of it, he utters a phrase that has shaped the world we live in — a phrase whose full implications most of us still need to apply to our lives. He tells both parties to give “Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” Jesus faces a trap set by the pro-tax Herodians and the anti-tax Pharisees...

4 people who heroically resisted Nazism...
John Clark
As Hitler and Nazism rose to power, millions of people resisted in many different ways. Some were well-known for their objection; prudence dictated that others remained clandestine. Some fought Nazism with the weapons of war; others fought back with the pen. Some landed on beaches of foreign lands; some never left their towns. Though most of the resisters never met, they formed a beautiful coalition of truth and love...

Bishop McElroy’s variation on the ‘seamless garment’ theme...

Bishop Daly challenges Bishop McElroy’s statements on abortion and the 2020 election...

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