Peter Pavia

In one of the many rules St. Benedict wrote for his 6th-century religious community, the father of Western monasticism directed his monks to “remember to keep death before your eyes daily.” A dour suggestion at first blush, Benedict was urging his followers to contemplate the... Read More →

Sometimes it seems as if the institutions of our seasick culture have embraced the same way of thinking, that is, that every problem is a public-relations problem crying out for a public-relations solution. This obsession with creating appearances instead of addressing realities... Read More →

    Following the natural order of things, my paternal great-grandfather died well before I was born. I bear the same name he did, except, of course, he was Pietro. A Calabrese who left his homeland for the confounding strangeness of this new world, he came over on the... Read More →

I would be at a terrible loss if politics were the most important thing in my life. I’d be holding straw. Daffodils are immune to political spin. Dogs, too. Moby Dick defies political deconstruction. Love defies political deconstruction. And so does truth. Read More →

While New York’s numbers have been stable for a while, the first weekend of October brought unsettling reports of a rising number of positive tests for coronavirus in certain New York City neighborhoods (and a couple of adjacent counties). Read More →

Stranded in the grinding dystopia of our Covid-colored world, millions of souls cowering behind screens, our hunger for truth, any kind of truth, has proved as often as not to be a will o’ the wisp Read More →

Day-to-day events are moving with the speed of an avalanche, so fast, in fact, that they threaten to bury me right here where I sit scribbling. Our moment cries out for a caveat: Between the time of this writing and the time of your reading some important new “fact” may be... Read More →

  I’ve never been much good at giving up anything. To temper my spiritual steel during past Lents, instead of sacrificing an indulgence—pizza or chocolate or a Hollywood melodrama of the 1930s—I have added to my daily routine a meditative or, since the Lord has chosen to... Read More →