A Tale of Faith & Reason

The Catholic Thing

I've got some surprising news. It was surprising to me, at least, and will probably be a surprise to you as well. This very month, November 2024, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Faith & Reason Institute, the umbrella non-profit organization under whose auspices The Catholic Thing, our TCT Courses, the Fides et Ratio seminars, the Summer Seminar on the Free Society, and much more take place. (Among the "much mores," I just sent to the publisher what will be my next book The Martyrs of the New Millennium, which is to say the 21st-century martyrs - a supplement to my earlier book on the 20th century. More about this before long.)
All in all, it's been a remarkable quarter century. And we will be celebrating those twenty-five years of work at a gala dinner in Washington D.C. on January 23rd where you will be able to meet with many of our TCT writers. And staff such as Brad Miner, Hannah Russo, Dominic Cassella, and Karen Popp, as well. (Click here for information on how to get tickets.) Among other friends, the Papal Posse will put in an appearance - for once I'll be the host for some fun with Raymond Arroyo and Fr. Gerald Murray. And there will be some other surprise guests.
Speaking of Fr. Murray, we just celebrated his 65th birthday and 40 years of service as a priest in the Archdiocese of New York. The next time you're tempted to think that everything seems lost, and the Church is doing nothing to counter the decay, it's worth remembering the many priests, religious, and - yes - even bishops and laypeople who have been laboring quietly at keeping the Church and the country alive.
I'm grateful for them and also for the survival and flourishing of our little "thing" over all these years. It's not just a pious sentiment when I tell people that the whole business - and TCT in particular - is a work of God. By all human reckoning, we should have failed multiple times.
Less than a year after our modest beginnings as F&RI, an event we remember now as 9/11 hit the nation. Back then, we did not have you - our large readership and generous supporters - to keep body and soul together. And the few foundations we did have were all woefully impacted by the plunge in the markets after the terrorist attacks.
We survived that somehow. And around the time of a second financial crisis - when the housing bubble burst in 2008 - Jason Boffetti, who had come with me from the Ethics & Public Policy Center to found the new Faith & Reason Institute - had a brilliant idea. We ought to, he said, start "a blog."
I don't consider myself particularly "backwardist" (in Rome, they may take a different view), at least when it comes to technologies. But my immediate response to Jason was a deeply considered "Hunh?"
It's just one sign of how much we've changed in the past twenty-plus years that everyone now knows what a blog is, though many people have migrated over to the Substacks and X. But back then, all I could ask was:
"How does a "blog" work?"
Jason: "We 'post' material online."
"And then what?"
"People read it."
"How do they know that we're out there?"
"We tell'em."
"How do we do that?"
And on and on. But it worked. And marvelously. Even the Chinese flu couldn't kill us.
I still resist calling TCT a "blog," which sounds like a techno-lumpen-entity to me (though I have dear friends who produce noteworthy and elegant "blogs.") The Catholic Thing likes to think of itself, in terms a little less au courant than others, as a series of daily columns. Mainstream journalism may have wrecked itself in recent years. And social media has beyond all doubt damaged attention spans. But just maybe, there's still room for a remnant of an old and venerable tradition of brief (our charism), pithy (our quotidian aspiration), well-argued public writing.
Which is why in this Thanksgiving week when we give thanks for so many things in our lives, I hope you will show your appreciation for The Catholic Thing and the work of the Faith & Reason Instit...