Author: Robert Llizo
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Towards The Eternal City: St. Augustine's Theology of History
It is quite common to hear from various Christian circles on how we must influence Washington with Christian values, and that bringing our nation to a more Christian footing morally, cultural and politically must be a top priority. But even if we did succeed in creating this optimum Christian society, what are the chances of…
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Change: Looking Back and Looking Forward
I am waxing a bit nostalgic at the moment. Fifteen years have gone by since I first faced a class of eighteen eager and thoughtful young people, wondering who this strange guy in tweed playing second fiddle to the charismatic, magic-producing founder of the Torrey Honors Institute was. In the weeks before my very first…
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Giles of Viterbo: The Humanist Scholastic
The Commentary on the Sentences of Petrus Lombardus, by Giles of Viterbo. Giles of Viterbo (1469-1532) was the most active and creative theologians who tried to bring together two worlds: the Renaissance and its call to return to the sources of classical antiquity, and the medieval scholastic tradition. Nothing brings out this creative syncretic…
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Some Poetry with Your Haircut, Sir?
I like vintage barber shops. Ever since I was a boy, they have been part of my life (of course, in those days, they were simply known as regular, run-of-the-mill barber shops). My father would take me to a Cuban barber who had a faint resemblance to Floyd, the barber in the “Andy Griffiths Show.”…
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What I learned from John Mark Reynolds
I can still recall the day, seventeen years ago. We were introduced one Sunday by a mutual mentor of ours, the late, much lamented Fr. Michael E. Trigg. After the morning liturgy, we three talked for quite an extended time in the parish hall during the coffee hour, talking books, ideas, and Socratic pedagogy. By…
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Lent’s Road to Eternity
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?—J.R.R. Tolkien, from his lecture titled “On Fairy Stories,” given in 1939. As a pre-adolescent kid growing up in…
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The Conversion of St. Paul
Christmas was exactly one month ago, and now, we celebrate another birth, or should I say , a new birth: the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, once fierce persecutor of the followers of Christ, now a formidable soldier for Christ. We can say with certainty that ignorance of St. Paul is ignorance of Christ, especially…
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Twelve Days of Christmas Jollification
For many, the famous English carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is lost on them. This became clear to me one rather cold evening on January 2 of last year, when I was at the checkout stand at a CVS drug store. After I made my purchase, the kind clerk wished me a “Happy New…
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Remembering the Honored Dead
They went with songs to the battle, they were young. Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow. They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted, They fell with their faces to the foe. They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the…
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Advent and the Four Last Things
My good friend and colleague Greg Peters’ sermon for the First Sunday of Advent inspired me to write a piece about the most quintessential aspect of the season of Advent that at first may strike one as morbid: the four “last things”: death, judgment, hell and heaven. When December comes around, we already see evidences…
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Claus von Stauffenberg: German Patriot and Hitler’s Would-Be Assassin
Today, November 15, is the one-hundred and fourth birthday of Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a Catholic aristocrat and officer of the German Wehrmacht who led the anti-Nazi resistance within the German war machine. On the 21st of July, 1944, this man, along with two other German army officers, Henning von Treskow and…
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Intimations of Eternity: George MacDonald, Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers on the Medieval Imagination
Do I dare Disturb the universe?—T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock…