Submission

“I have to say, you’re wrong. Natural selection is a universal principle, which applies to all living things, but it can take all sorts of forms. It exists even in the plant world, where it’s a matter of access to nutritious soil, to water, to sunlight … Man is an animal, as we know, but he’s not a prairie dog or an antelope. His dominance doesn’t

Aggression often masks a desire to seduce

For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure, and no one had ever given me more pleasure

One pillar of Chesterton and Belloc’s philosophy was the principle of subsidiarity: that no entity (social, financial, or political) could take charge of any function if it could be handled by a smaller entity. Pope Pius XI defined the principle in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno: “Just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and to commit

For these Muslims, the real enemy—the thing they fear and hate—isn’t Catholicism. It’s secularism. It’s laicism. It’s atheist materialism. They think of Catholics as fellow believers. Catholicism is a religion of the Book. Catholics are one step away from converting to Islam—that’s the true, original Muslim vision of Christianity.

In the case of mammals, if you compared the female, with her long gestation period, to the male, with his essentially limitless capacity to reproduce, it was clear that the pressures of selection would fall principally on the males. If some males enjoyed access to several females, others would necessarily have none. So this inequality between males

But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.

A couple is a world, autonomous and enclosed, that moves through the larger world essentially untouched; on my own, I was full of chips and cracks,

In the monastery, at least, one was assured of room and board—and, best-case scenario, eternal life as a bonus.