Dominicans are just the coolest. Following their thirteenth-century founder, St. Dominic, today’s Dominicans are “learned, disciplined, and poor”; but I’ve yet to meet one who does not also radiate the joy of the Gospel and simply know how to have a good time. Dominicans always preaching, but never preachy, and this way of being is on beautiful display in the new sophomore album, Living for the Other Side, by the Hillbilly Thomists, a group of friars from the Province of St. Joseph. Their eponymous 2017 debut record was magnificent, and well received. Their new effort takes their art to a whole new level, inviting both a greater musical appreciation and a deeper devotion to the Lord who inspired the creators and performers of the album’s fourteen tracks. On Living for the Other Side (which releases on January 28—the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas), the personnel is mostly…

What does the Church mean when she calls the family the domestic church? A brief summary of the Scriptures and the development of how the term has been used will prove helpful. Judaism has always placed significance on the family. Family is everything for Israel. Without it, there is no covenant. This is very clear in the Old Testament, but there is a tension within the New Testament. In the Gospels, Jesus seems to be critical of the family. In his call to discipleship, Jesus says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Instead of uniting the family, Jesus seems to be the cause of its division: “For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and…

I am delighted to announce, at last, the release of my book Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages. I’m honored beyond words that it should be the inaugural publication of the new Word on Fire Academic imprint. As the title of my book indicates, it’s a study of Tolkien’s engagement with modern literature, which turns out to be much more extensive than anyone previously realized, myself included. I was surprised, for example, to find that one kind of modern literature that he had an enthusiasm for was detective fiction. But given that my research was much like a detective story, this discovery was highly appropriate! How did this book get started? We could go back to when, as a young teenager, I read Tolkien’s great essay “On Fairy-stories.” I was already a huge admirer of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but it was at…