D.C. Schindler

“Confirmation presupposes Baptism, and elevates what is established here to a new mode of being without making it something different.”

“Beauty is first of all a revelation of what is good in itself. Under the sign of beauty, the world presents itself most fundamentally as something to marvel at, something that provokes wonder and even awe, and if and when we pursue our interests in this world, we do so with an encompassing spirit of gratitude and reverence.”

“The ruler bears witness to the meaningfulness of reality, and in doing so he augments its meaning, opening up the world to the dimensions that would allow a properly human existence to unfold.”

“A good education is a soul-shaking discovery of what was always-already there, always-already given—which is precisely what it means to receive the real as a gift.”

“Man is capable of giving himself in a complete and genuinely ontological way only because his being is already gift, and his being is gift by virtue of the act of the Creator, who willed him for his own sake and by that fact willed him to will himself in an act of self-giving.”

“Through memory, we receive and allow ourselves to be formed by the great treasures that belong to our history and culture, which are particular reflections of eternal truths, all as a gift from God.”

“[A]ll language is ultimately a speaking of heart to heart. . . . All language has this form because it is an ‘incarnation’ of meaning in the flesh of the word, which is sent out abroad, from which journey it does not return without bearing some fruit, and prospering the thing in which it is received.”

“The man and woman, paradoxically, each have to go beyond their nature, we might say, to accomplish a wholly natural end.”

“The loss of authority is an evacuation of the substance of political existence—indeed, the radical impoverishment of all community from top to bottom.”

“[C]ulture is the faith made visible, and being visible is the heart of the faith in the God who made himself visible in Christ.”

“In [Christ’s] mediation, the medium truly is the message: God reveals himself as love, and he does so precisely by giving himself in love, and thus enabling those he loves to love him and each other in turn.”

“[T]he incommunicability of personhood, manifest in the exclusivity of gender, brings to light the fact that true unity is not homogeneity, monochromatic sameness, but—quite literally, if one plays with the etymology—heterogeneity; it is a unity in and through the different relations to generation or fruitfulness .”

“[T]here is no more decisive expression of the dominion of the world entrusted to man than the task of saying things in an adequate way that does justice to their essence and gratuitously, mercifully, elevating them to a mode of existence not given in their essence alone.”

“Is childhood an intrinsic perfection , to such an extent that growing out of it is not only a gain (which it quite evidently is), but at the same time an irretrievable (?) loss ?”

“What is passed on in tradition is not just some truth, but the ground of all truth.”

“Beauty opens our heart only because at the same time it opens our eyes.”

“[G]ender is a differentiated unity or a unified difference, and is both, so to speak, ‘all the way down’ to the core of the being.”

[O]nly if “God is being,” that is, only if the God of Jesus Christ has also revealed himself in creation, does the extraordinary event of the Incarnation bear, not just on my feelings or on my moral intentions, but on the meaning of reality as a whole.

When we see technê , human work, as determined by reality precisely as true, good, and beautiful, the practice it entails brings man into contact with a whole universe of meaning that eventually involves man’s most determinative relationships.

"In a word, the reductive notion of health causes disorder, which means that the very energies devoted to the pursuit of this health may turn out to be a profound cause of disease."

“There is nothing more human than marriage, and yet no general human reality is more full of grace: marriage is, as St. Paul said, the ‘mega mystery.’”

"We can put the decisive question thus: Is there something to be gained precisely from receiving a truth from another that one could in principle simply see for oneself?"

“[T]he Catholic view [of politics] in fact is more catholic, more inclusive, more respectful of the meaning of man and the human condition, of contemporary pluralism, than liberalism.”

“Gratuity is part of the fundamental meaning of education. Only if we embrace this gratuity at the heart of the university do we in fact respond to the crisis of fragmentation.”

“Jesus Christ not only is the ultimate meaning of things, but at the same time truly gives meaning to things, and perhaps the most radical form of this gift is to receive meaning from them.”

"Only an analogy of nature that has room for the inanimate character of matter will be able to accommodate the abiding finitude of the human being."

“The common good . . . is not merely an object of desire, but a way of being—specifically, a paradoxical unity of giving and receiving.”

“While the conventional contemporary view of the world conceives of thought as opposed to, or at any rate outside of, the real, the classical worldview understands thought as a deepening of the real, and therefore as a bringing of experience to fruition.”

“Money has the whole of its truth in being a symbol of the soul’s adherence to the good. It is meant, above all, to be a ‘reminder’ to those who are wealthy in a true sense.”

“God, in Jesus, assumes the world’s restless desire for God, so that the world can come to share in God’s restless desire for the world.”

“If the poet thus stands ‘before the Cross,’ as the title of one of his books has it, the mystery upon which he meditates is not just one possibility of many, but is in fact the sole mystery that allows him to celebrate the universe in its totality, which means the mystery that allows him truly to be a poet, as Claudel understands the vocation.”

“The imagination is where the world can have a sort of spiritual home in us, and for that same reason is what allows us to have a home in the world.”

“God is charity, then, because the world is dear to him. It represents, in some respect, a goodness and beauty that God himself ‘desires.’”

“While the critique of ontotheology would have thinking first attempt to rid itself of idols, a dramatic view of reason would have it seek instead to enter more deeply into the movement that is always-already underway, and thus this view presupposes a positive relation to God that is more fundamental than the negative or neutral.”

“The event of revelation . . . can take reason wholly by surprise, even shatter its expectations, demand a rethinking of everything it previously thought from top to bottom, and yet remain perfectly rational . . . on one condition only: that it is the very nature of reason in its normal, everyday constitution, to be taken by surprise.”

“Freedom is dependent on the existence of things of intrinsic value. A world of mere options is a world without the possibility of freedom.”