Until They Breathe Together
Twenty-four centuries ago Aristotle named eight Greek cities torn apart after taking in settlers, and named the cure: time, until the peoples “breathe together.” Fr. G. V. W. Lewis tells their stories, weighs them against Rome, Deuteronomy, Aquinas and the Fathers, and adds his eyewitness account of Portugal’s retornados to ask what the West must learn about the pace of belonging.
GRAFTED IN: On What Makes Us Who We Are
A passport records a legal fact; it cannot tell you who you are. Drawing on St. Paul, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and the social sciences, Fr. G. V. W. Lewis argues that identity is formed by faith, culture and memory over generations, answers the ‘invented nation’ theorists, and proposes Ruth and the grafted olive as the Christian model of belonging — received, slow, and open to all who take root.
TWO SWORDS, ONE ENOUGH
Luke 22:36–38 Between the Sword of the Magistrate and the Consent of the Governed - A Coda to The Sword and the Stranger and The State and the Open Door. Conclusion to the Essay Trilogy on “Immigration, the State and Public Consent”.
THE SWORD AND THE STRANGER
Popular argument on this question, from both directions, tends to treat the Gospels as though they were a manual of border statute waiting to be applied. They are not, and a piece that pretends otherwise earns nothing but the reader's justified suspicion. But refusing that error is not the same as refusing the question. Scripture, read across its full canon and its subsequent theological elaboration, does make two distinct and authentically weighty claims that bear on the matter of illegal immigration — one concerning the competence of civil authority, the other concerning the personal duty owed to the stranger.
