Multiculturalism: The Great Western Fiasco!
Within the space of four months, between October 2010 and February 2011, the heads of government of Germany, Britain and France each declared, in terms that would have been unsayable a decade earlier, that multiculturalism had failed.[1] The declarations were political, and politics forgets its confessions quickly; but they gave official voice to something ordinary citizens across Western Europe had been saying among themselves for a generation. The difficulty is that the word failed is too blunt to be useful, and its bluntness has invited an equally blunt reply: that Britain, France and Germany are full of people of foreign origin who are entirely at home, and that those who speak of failure are therefore either mistaken or malicious.
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.
The Man Who Could Not Read
From the Parthenon to Bach's autographs, Durham's vaults to the Moon landing: what the West has made, and why it burns so easily. After Mosul's museum, Palmyra and 47 French libraries struck in 2023, Fr. Lewis asks what happens when migration outpaces inheritance and doctrine meets the mob, and finds the deepest danger is a West that no longer teaches its own children to read.
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 STATE and the Open Door: Romans 13, Civil Authority, and Christian Hospitality
St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans 13:1–7 does not present civil government as a regrettable concession to human sin, a necessary evil merely to be endured until the Parousia. The Apostle Paul assigns the ruler a positive title and a genuine function. The one in authority is διάκονος θεοῦ—God’s servant or minister—twice over (v. 4). He “does not bear the sword in vain” (τὴν μάχαιραν οὐ γὰρ εἰκῇ φορεῖ).
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.
Public Letter to the Christian Faithful: The Threat of Unmanaged Immigration
To all who hold the Christian faith, and to those who cherish the inheritance of Western civilisation built upon Judeo-Christian foundations:
We write in a spirit of clarity and resolve concerning the present crisis of migration into Europe, and specifically the policies pursued by Spain and other European governments. Read more…
A Public Letter to the Faithful - Attacks on Churches
Public letter to all Christians, regarding the apparent gradual increase in arson attacks against Churches, desecration of the Holy Eucharist in tabernacles and systematic destruction of the visible presence of Christianity.
Islam, Haram, and the Fate of the West
There are conversations that polite society prefers to defer, always hoping that the urgency will somehow resolve itself. This is no longer one of those conversations. Churches have been set ablaze. Synagogues have been firebombed. Sacred art has been desecrated. And across European and North American cities, the accumulated heritage of two thousand years of Christian civilisation — its music, its sculpture, its literature, its architecture — is increasingly subject to demands, pressures, and acts of hostility rooted in a theological framework that considers much of that heritage to be, quite literally, forbidden. The name of that framework is haram.
