“Your vocation is not an interruption to your spiritual life. Your vocation is your spiritual life.”
—Emmanuel Smith at Desert Catholic
“Pride has become far more than the active celebration of freedom from discrimination. It is a revolution in what constitutes morality: it is more than merely eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it is the uprooting of the tree itself, and the fashioning of an idol out of the wood.”
—Aaron Edwards at That Good Fight
“To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens, the moment they put foot in our country… would be nothing less, than to admit the Grecian [i.e., Trojan] Horse into the Citadel of our Liberty and Sovereignty.”
—Alexander Hamilton in “The Examination Number VIII”
“When evil men make the rules, righteous men become outlaws.”
—Biblical Man at, well, Biblical Men
“As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
—Pope John Paul II in a homily
“The old Cartesian-Enlightenment modern model of reality is in full collapse. Wake up. [ … ] The suppositions of historical, philosophical modernity will not survive this. Normal, middle-class Christianity will not survive this. If you cling to these suppositions, and weak ways of practicing the faith, you will be naked and undefended before forces far beyond any of our comprehension.”
—Rod Dreher at Rod Dreher’s Diary
“Never smoke your pipe while you are praying, but always pray while you smoke your pipe.”
—Building Catholic Men at, well, Building Catholic Men
“One of the reasons I think Christianity is true is because so many people hate it.”
—Tucker Carlson on The Tucker Carlson Network
“I tell my wife I’m going out to buy an envelope: ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?’ And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
“Christian, if you’re waiting for the culture to turn itself around, it won’t. This madness ends only one way: when the Church stops acting like a chaplain to a pagan empire and starts proclaiming truth like prophets in the wilderness.”
—Virgil Walker at, well, Virgil Walker
“The Church in the West must course correct from a generation of feckless surrender and hirelings.”
—Steve Deace on X
“Grace may be free, but most people don’t want it.”
—Rémy Rougeau in the introduction to The Diary of a Country Priest
“From the Passover table to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, God’s people are a people who eat and drink with gladness. Feasting is obedience. Celebration is spiritual warfare.”
—Bryan Furlong at Furlong Field Press
“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
—Joanna Maciejewska on X
“The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.”
—Søren Kierkegaard in Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard
“Therapy culture in the secular West has emerged as a substitute for the gaping spiritual void left by the desacralization of the world and the loss of sacramental confession. ¶ Where people once confessed sins to a priest for absolution, they now confess feelings to a therapist.”
—Ray Alex Williams on Substack
Traveling Vocabularium
iatrogenic
whelmed
Things I’ve Written
Things Worth Reading
“AI as Ouija Board & Familiar,” by Rod Dreher
If you liked this post, please forward and share with your friends. It really helps.
Also, if you’d like express your gratitude and contribute to my work, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi.
Finally, please subscribe if you haven’t already done so. All posts are always free: simply choose the free option when you sign up — but I also invite you to support me financially with a paid option if you wish.
©2025 Josh Bishop, bishopscommonplace.com
(More at joshbishop.substack.com.)
Vonnegut ftw constantly