The world needs to know what we are, and so we must be, as conspicuously as possible, people of deep holiness and equally deep compassion, and so a true household of God. The world needs to know as well what we see when we look at them, and so we need to examine the world carefully, and just as carefully treat the wounds we see with the medicine of grace.

J. Budziszewski finally recognized the Savior that he had abandoned, and as it turned out, it was just in the nick of time.

The New Testament not only embraced the Old Testament view that Christians were to be a society whose holiness attracted pagans, but extended it by requiring active and vigorous evangelization.

Growth is occurring because existing churches around the world have committed resources and leadership to it. Most of it, however, is happening because there are serious believers in those places who see the need, and are answering it.

New theories of information are bending more and more toward God as a respectable explanation for the existence and order of the universe (see Stephen Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis). This is not good news for many secularized non-believers, and their hostility may be one of the reasons for increased radicalism in gender ideology and immigration, flirtation with communism, and recrusdescent anti-semitism.

Our struggle is not against the Nazis – or Antifa, or MAGA supporters – but against an enemy far more subtle and dangerous, viz. the world, the flesh and the devil.

All the advances of Church and culture since the time of Paul have begun with laypeople gathering with each other, around scripture, and in prayer. The priesthood only emerged when the Church began to grow and needed consistent leadership.

Where is the next place where there is a critical mass of believers who are evangelically motivated to find bold and novel ways to talk about Jesus, believers who are less concerned with “the wrong sort of people” and more concerned with (gasp!) being the right kind of witnesses.

Soup kitchens, food pantries, and homeless shelters are not enough. We need evangelization to build an army, too, and the Eucharist to feed it.

Christmas is what will get a lot of people through the door. It is always Easter that will make them stay.

Evangelists are wasting time if people have to guess whether they are Christians. Our business is too urgent. There is no time for dropping hints.

Even apostles had to be told rather bluntly that discipleship is not about holding on, but about going and telling.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know what the truth is. The problem is that just enough people have been challenging all that, and we have gotten confused.

The feeding stories of the New Testament are not meant to portray the mission of the Church as a hunger program. We do not fulfill our calling as disciples by having soup kitchens and food pantries. All the feeding stories of the New Testament are signs of a much deeper and broader mission, viz., to make disciples of all nations.

Christians are to be the people who are odd because of Jesus. Christians are to be the people who have saints on their calendars and beads in their pockets. Christians are to be the people who have Bibles on their coffee tables instead of coasters, and who never make plans for Sundays that don’t include Mass. Christians are to be the people who know the truth that makes them odd even while it makes them free.

But it isn’t Christian people who save. It isn’t the Church that saves. The Church and Christian people are not “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Jesus does. Jesus is. What do you say about Him? Jesus is the one that matters.

We were never meant to keep the words and insights of the Bible to ourselves. In fact, Jesus said that keeping those insights to ourselves amounts to denying Him, and denying Him is a ticket to hell.

If we want to be the kind of people who are prepared to create the next institutions that will lift, advance, and bless the culture we need to do what St. Benedict did, and cultivate an orderly life that makes time daily not just for work, but also for study and prayer, who have a rational relationship with information technology, who find in the Bible an answer for the dull ennui and psychic despair that is the daily bread of so many young people.

Young people especially are experiencing a crisis of meaning, depression, hopelessness and anxiety. At the same time Bible sales are up 22%. Conversions to Catholicism in some places are up dramatically – 73% in Dallas-Fort Worth, 160% in France since 2015. People might not understand a thing we say about Reconciliation, Sanctification, or Evangelization, but it looks like they are trying to find out.

There were bigmouths in the Church from the start, people who dared to talk about Jesus out loud, very loud, louder than the people who were uncomfortable, louder than the people who hated them, louder than the people who killed them, loud enough to be heard by the people who finally recognized them as the salt of the earth and the light of the world.