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Fr. Hugh Barbour, O.Praem., is prior of St. Michael's Abbey in Trabuco Canyon, California.
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Articles and Posts by Hugh-barbour:

  • On Dueling, Divorce, and Red Indians(3)

    In a society in which every standard is viewed as subject to a notion of progress that is, at root, technological and material, it can be dangerous to characterize fundamental human impulses as primitive or barbarous. Even if they are impulses corrupted by fallen nature, by concupiscence and pride, they remain rooted in our nature and are meant for the good.

  • Moonstruck Morality Versus the Cosmos(37)

    January 25 of this year marked the 50th anniversary of the surprise announcement of Pope John XXIII that he intended to convoke a general council. From 1959 to 1962, the soon-to-be-jettisoned constitutions and decrees that would have been discussed were composed by preparatory committees of eminent Roman theologians. Among these is one document that is remarkable for its keen prescience and consequent pastoral anxiety. It never even made it to the floor of the council.

  • Liberality, the Basis of Culture(7)

    The Ultimate Homeschool.

  • Educated at Home(0)

    “Let us eat and make merry.”
    —Luke 15:23

    “This has been a happy time: I’ve spent all day with my family, eaten a fine meal, played with my grandchildren, been to a baptism, and I went to communion.” These were the words of my uncle—with their telling rhetorical climax—on leaving his sister’s house in Eastern North Carolina one Sunday evening last fall. I was back visiting, and the family had converged for the baptism of a little “first cousin once-removed.” The baptism had been held on a communion Sunday at the Methodist church. After, there was a reception at home, with the preacher and his wife, friends, and the usual compliment of children running around the yard on all four sides of the house, messing up their good clothes.

  • Thomas Fleming and Mother Teresa: Undoubted Motives in the Morality of Everyday Life(0)

    Too bad that, since 1966, they are no longer adding titles to the Index of Prohibited Books. My more than ten years as diocesan censor librorum—was it this past distinction that gained me the happy task of writing this review?—would lead me to grant Thomas Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition an imprimatur after a few nugatory adjustments, but what a book such as this really needs is a condemnation.

  • “Gay Marriage”(0)

    Our society, for ideological reasons, has chosen to judge all human relationships according to the standard of equality and inequality, even the rapport between the sexes. Thus it was only consistent that the relationship between man and woman would be freed of its original and essential foundation in procreation, a good not precisely measurable by any standard of social equality, since, in a sense, birth and family ties are the natural foundation of any evaluation of equity and inequity within the human race.