Dwight Longenecker's Blog, page 81

The Clash of Secular and Sacred

  My article for Imaginative Conservative this week connects with my visit to England. It is an analysis of two films by Robert Bolt: Man for All Seasons and The Mission When church and state conspire together the state ultimately wins, for the church’s real power can never be of this world, and any true believer who is [Read More...]

English Martyrs Pilgrimage Diary 4

Sometimes on a pilgrimage like this shepherding thirty or forty people and their luggage some stuff goes wrong. You miss a connection or someone gets lost or you could have had some details organized better. On the other hand, sometimes unexpected gifts are given. We’re still talking about the serendipitous Corpus Christi procession at Oxborough [Read More...]

England Pilgrimage Diary 3

We’ve been away from internet for a few days on our English Martyrs-Literary Pilgrimage of England with Joseph Pearce After a Saturday evening hike around London’s West End with dinner at in Chinatown we left on Sunday morning for the cathedral city of Ely where we visited the little church of St Etheldreda. Sunday morning Mass [Read More...]

England Pilgrimage Diary 2

We are having an action packed pilgrimage! After yesterday’s moving and powerful visit to Tyburn and other London churches we boarded the coach today for a trip to Canterbury. We visited the delightful church of St Thomas of Canterbury and met the priest and venerated the relics of St Thomas a Becket and relics of [Read More...]

Catholic Martyrs Pilgrimage Diary

We arrived in London yesterday and went drove immediately to the Tower of  London where we were taken on an excellent tour. On Tower Hill we were shown the exact site where St Thomas More and St John Fisher were executed, then visiting the tower saw the Crown Jewels, the site of Anne Boleyn’s execution [Read More...]

Elastic and Plastic America

Bruce Jenner’s stunning transformation into “Caitlyn” has taken America’s love affair with superficiality and stage effects to a new high. Plastered across the media with nowhere to hide is an image of a sixty five year old grandfather made up as a voluptuous young woman. And we’re expected to bow down to this image and [Read More...]

Bruce Jenner’s New Clothes

You remember the story of the emperor’s new clothes. The tailors charged him loads of money to give him a total make over. He was going to be a totally new emperor. They told him how wonderful he was and they stitched and cut and made him up, and at last he went on public [Read More...]

Vanity Fair? Call Me Confused…

It has been difficult not to have one’s nose pushed into a particular image this week. It is that of a former Olympic athlete dolled up as a woman on the cover of the appropriately named Vanity Fair.  Readers may remember the original Vanity Fair appeared in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Vanity Fair is a place where every [Read More...]

The Dissolving Family and the Bio Tech Revolution

This week’s article for National Catholic Register explores the seismic upheaval that has been the bio tech revolution. We seem blind to the fact that we are living in the midst of the most astounding technological revolution the world has ever seen. Biotechnology is the umbrella term for all the advances we have made in medical know-how, [Read More...]

Cheap Church Cheap Faith

My latest article at Aleteia defends the building of beautiful churches–beginning with the one in our parish for which we are soon to break ground. We are just about to break ground for a beautiful new church in my parish in Greenville, South Carolina. Whenever Catholics plan to lay out a significant sum of money [Read More...]