Fr. James V. Schall, SJ

About Fr. James V. Schall, SJ

Fr. James Schall, SJ (1928–2019), was long a professor of political science at Georgetown University, a thinker of wide learning, and an author extensively published — including, happily, here at HPR.

On Mary the Mother of God, Queen of the Universe

To attempt to read the psalms and other texts of the Marian Office in this way is to step into a beam that will require us to see not only the Virgin but indeed the whole of Christianity in a light most modern Christians, not to mention … [Read more...]

On the World’s Most Beautiful Sermon

I. A sermon is an essay or a treatise that is spoken. Classical sermons of Newman, or some of the great French preachers, could last for hours. Great Protestant divines were known for long and powerfully delivered sermons. We live in a … [Read more...]

Frank Sheed on Church Teachings

We hear much discussion of late about church teaching, especially with regard to marital issues, and whether statements of the Pope violate classical norms. Cardinals issue their doubts; sixty theologians inaugurate what they call … [Read more...]

Under Eden’s Spell

I do not think my students understand Christianity…. Many (students in class) are denominationally Roman Catholic. Some are Protestant. While childhood years spent in pews watching the liturgy or undergoing initiation rites of one sort or a … [Read more...]

A German Philosopher Sees the World

A Review Essay of Josef Pieper’s Not Yet the Twilight: An Autobiography

“The almost lethal crisis of American Catholicism after the second Vatican Council, I was convinced, consisted mainly in the absence of a living theology in the universities. Again and again, the guest (i.e., Pieper) from Europe, the old c … [Read more...]

The End of Time

This is our humanity: Not to know who we are or what we will become.—David Horowitz, The End of Time, 2005.[1. David Horowitz, The End of Time (San Francisco” Encounter Books 2005), 19.] Therefore, despite the fact that the Christian’s at … [Read more...]

On Reconstructing Mankind

Managed evolution…is a two pronged attack on human suffering. The first prong is positive, namely the fabrication of ever more perfect humans. The second is negative, requiring the elimination of all defectives, beginning with the smallest n … [Read more...]

Islam and French Politics: A Reflection

The freedom that we so easily demand is a freedom without reason, a freedom that does not need to give reasons since it always has a "right" or a "value" at its disposal; so marvelous are these claims that they are established just by being … [Read more...]

Maritain on Just About Everything

“God is an All-powerful Cause because He gives to all things their being and their very nature and acts in them, more intimate to them than they are to themselves, in the way that is proper to their essential being; thus assuring from w … [Read more...]

“Why Do I Exist?”: The Unavoidable Wonderment

(Socrates) “Could anything great really come to pass in a short time? And isn’t the time from childhood to old age short when compared to the whole of time?” (Glaucon) “It is a mere nothing.” (Socrates) “Well, do you think that an immortal b … [Read more...]

On a Small Point of Doctrine

He (Sir Thomas More) gave up life itself, deliberately; he accepted violent death as of a criminal, not even for the Faith as a whole, but on one particular, small point of doctrine—to wit, the supremacy of the See of Peter. (Hilaire B … [Read more...]

Why Do Priests Need Philosophy?

When he (Aquinas) was not sitting, reading a book, he walked round and round the cloister, and walked fast and even furiously, a very characteristic action of men who fight their battles in the mind. (G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas.) … [Read more...]

The Nativity of Christ

Its Historic Reality

In those days, Caesar Augustus published a decree ordering a census of the whole world. This first took place when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. Everyone went to register, each to his own town. And so Joseph went from his own town of … [Read more...]

On “Whose God Is God?”

The problem is not with God. The problem is already located in the classical Garden in Genesis, the question of man preferring his own world to that more noble world that God has destined him for, and in which, being the kind of being he … [Read more...]

On Thinking the Actual World Out of Existence

The scanty conceptions to which we can attain of celestial things give us, from their excellence, more pleasure than all the knowledge of the world in which we live; just as a half-glimpse of persons that we love is more delightful than a … [Read more...]