Author: Laramie Hirsch

St. Hubert and a Catholic Defense of Hunting
Happy St. Hubert’s Day, everyone. By now, we are done with our soul cakes, our Hallowtide jack-o-lanterns, our cemetery visits, parties, and trick-or-treating. The carved pumpkins are getting softer, the candy is wearing out its welcome, and many folks are …

Bastille Day: Blood, Death, and Exterminating the Beautiful
This week’s Bastille Day in Paris featured a man flying around on a brand new flyboard prototype, designed by inventor Franky Zapata. This “future soldier” buzzed through the air above the crowds and underneath a sky clouded in the colors …

The Fire of Purgatory Comes from Hell
The time from Michaelmas until the Hallowtide, for me, has always been a time to reflect upon Hell itself. After all, as fall settles on the Northern Hemisphere, people tend to reflect upon the afterlife as the days grow shorter …

Want to be a happier Catholic? Read fantasy.
American Founder and second U.S. president John Adams once extolled his era. Some called it The Age of Reason. It was a time in which people were beginning to know more about their world than they ever had before. Knowledge …

Cornered, We Rise
All around us, the signs are there. The ship is going down. Institutions of all stripes are corrupted at all levels, and almost all of these institutions are polarizing themselves against any burning embers left over from Christendom. For centuries, …

The Theatrics of Christ’s Ascension
Atheists love to catch faithful, religious Catholics on scientific technicalities in order to instill doubt in the back of their minds, or simply to humiliate them. “Miracle #1 couldn’t have happened because of scientific principle A.” “Miracle #2 couldn’t have …

Latin: The Sacramental Language
There is a hierarchy of language. This is true for secular politics and cultural commerce, as well as in terms of religion. In this hierarchy, some languages are higher than others. JRR Tolkien, a philologist at Oxford, was quite aware …

How Should a Catholic ‘Remember, Remember’ Guy Fawkes Day?
So it’s Guy Fawkes Day. Thanks to the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament, English Protestants have had a Catholic boogeyman to focus their hate on for centuries. Fawkes would have been the Osama bin Laden of Catholics, had he …