This essay is excerpted and adapted from comments delivered on April 29 at the Scala Foundation's conference "Art, the Sacred, and the Common Good."

If you've not been in the Vatican basilica on February 22, the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, by all means put that on your bucket list. 

For the child — and the adult who knows there is still a child in all of us — fairy tales reveal truths about ourselves and the world.

This is the final article in a series of three.

This is the second article in a series of three.

In this witty, elegant, revelatory biography, Richard Greene states that his "book takes a very high view of Graham Greene's accomplishments and so endorses the common opinion of three generations of writers and critics that he is one of the most important figures in modern literature." 

This is the first of three postings on beauty as a principle of choice.

They say that Michelangelo saw the figures he sculpted within the rough blocks of marble.

Among other things, this deployment of the critical spirit acts as a bastion against the engulfing rust of presentism.

This fresco of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Fra Angelico can found at the Vatican in the Chapel of Pope Nicholas V.