2026 started off on a bit of a false note, as I tore my calf muscle two Saturdays ago while hunting a Death’s-head Hawkmoth (Acherontia Atropos) in the early hours of the morning.>While this might sound like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe tale, I can assure you it is not. These moths—unsure whether they are found anywhere other than Africa—are about the size of my hand, sound like a small bat fluttering its wings, and, when distressed, actually screech. After keeping me awake for two nights in a row, I took action at about 2 a.m. on January 17. In the middle of my angry acrobatics, I landed wrong and tore the muscle.>The result? Six weeks in a moon boot, on crutches, and mostly homebound, followed by rehab. Slightly discouraging for a person who loves running, cycling, and being outside. But there is also a bright side: this has afforded me more time to read and write. I am currently reading Liberalism Is a Sin (embarrassingly, for the first time), re-reading Revolution and Counter-Revolution by Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, and recently finished Return to Order by John Horvat II.

Originally published in Radical Fidelity. Read original article

A recent article by Patrick Neve (“The Parish You Hate Might Need You”) set the Catholic internet alight, provoking defenses and counterdefenses of his argument that Catholics should not go parish hopping but instead dig in their heels at their “bad” parish and try to change it from the inside.>I am not going to address Neve’s article directly. He is clearly a Novus Ordo Catholic, as he cites Paul VI and seems blind to the massive underlying problems. I say this because his arguments do not appear to be framed around Novus Ordo versus Traditional Catholicism, but rather around irreverent Novus Ordo versus more reverent Novus Ordo. (By saying this I am not judging his heart; to be honest, until this little forest fire erupted, I had never heard of him before.)>I was not even planning to get involved in the debate. There are several reasons for this. People close to me are struggling with exactly this (false) dilemma, and I do not want to drag their personal struggles into the public sphere.

Originally published in Radical Fidelity. Read original article