THE DOCTOR’S TAKE Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Two NBA players, Enes Freedom and Royce White, now identify as women to compete in the WNBA. The debate is framed as a private matter of identity, beyond correction. The logic of the City of Man and the WNBA holds no argument against the absurdist move.

Aquinas answers in the Summa, Q.93, A.4: the image of God in man is found in the intellectual nature — the natural aptitude to know and love God, common to every soul, fixed at the making, not chosen by the will. Genesis names it directly: “male and female He created them.” The sexed form is given, not authored.

The image was given at creation — wanting cannot remake what was made.

THE CHAPEL OF GRACE: ENTERING THE ACADEMY

TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, AUGUST 30, 2026

Gospel Reading: Matthew 16:21-27

From this hour Jesus sets His face toward Jerusalem and tells them plainly: He will suffer, be killed, and on the third day rise. Peter pulls Him aside to protest, God forbid, Lord, this will never happen to you. Jesus turns on him: Get behind me, Satan; you are not thinking as God thinks, but as men do.

“He said therefore to Peter, Get thee behind me, as to one who through ignorance was ceasing to walk after Christ.”
(Origen, Catena Aurea, Matthew 16:23)

Peter’s rebuke is not malice but a mistaken mercy, the desire to spare Christ, and himself, the Cross entirely. This is the wound the City of Man calls empathy: formation that promises flourishing while quietly engineering around sacrifice, treating the Cross as a regrettable cost rather than the redemptive suffering it is.

The test is not whether your formation avoids suffering but whether it is ordered by the Cross toward the Beatific Vision: does it teach the soul to receive sacrifice, or merely to manage around it? Does it operate by the lights of man or of the Logos?

WEEK AT A GLANCE

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St. Isidore’s Artisan Academy is a citadel of formation, not a platform of information. The Canon comes out weekly with concept-by-concept formation in the Thomistic-Augustinian Catholic education Tradition.

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THE CHAPEL OF GRACE: ENTERING THE ACADEMY

TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, AUGUST 23, 2026

Gospel Reading: Matthew 16:13-20

Jesus comes to the region of Caesarea Philippi and asks his disciples who people say the Son of Man is. They answer: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. He turns and asks them plainly: But who do you say that I am?

“But see how the Father reveals the Son, and the Son the Father; from none other comes it to confess the Son than of the Father, and from none other to confess the Father than of the Son.”
— St. John Chrysostom

This is not only the question of faith, but it is also the question underlying every discipline: who spoke the universe and its order into being? The City of Man teaches mathematics, history, and literature as though each floated free of its only ground. Peter’s confession is the truth without which no other truth holds together.

The test is not whether a student can recite the Creed but whether he can say, in the language of his own discipline, why Peter’s confession grounds it, and whether that confession still points him toward the Beatific Vision.

WEEK AT A GLANCE

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THE DOCTOR’S TAKE Tuesday, August18, 2026

Government hearings, viral drone footage, and breathless docuseries now treat alien presence on Earth as established fact. The effort to create a mass belief in ‘aliens’ is the rotten fruit of well-cultivated credulity as public school methodology. This movement is belief manufactured by repetition and desire, not evidence.

Aquinas saw this trap eight centuries ago. Truth, he taught, is not asserted into being; it is “the conformity or adequateion of thing and intellect” — the mind actually matching the thing as it is (De Veritate Q.1, A.1). A claim repeated a thousand times remains false until the intellect has been conformed to the res.

The alien indoctrination? What do you call it? The intellect does not manufacture truth by wanting it. It conforms to what is, or it is wrong.

Language is a covenant with reality created by God, not a convention arbitrarily invented by man. When a child says "cat," he is not making a noise the tribe has agreed to accept; he is naming a reality the human soul was made to grasp.

It has become cliché to notice and say, “The Public Schools are horrible!” It is a slogan we all believe in, and we can name dozens of horrible things about these institutions of propaganda and indoctrination. What we have lost sight of as a civilization is the deep roots of what has gone so terribly wrong and how we can recover a true to being education. If we were to pull the ubiquitous weeds out of the inner landscape, the first good seeds that need to be planted are the seeds that sprout into a deep understanding of the origin, nature, and purpose of human language. Listen and read below to enter into the conversation.

Have a listen to WHAT IS A WORD with Dr. Marcus Peter, AVE MARIA IN THE AFTERNOON

Read the article appearing in The Catholic Thing: What Is a Cat?

THE CHAPEL OF GRACE: ENTERING THE ACADEMY

TWENTIETH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, AUGUST 16, 2026

Gospel Reading: Matthew 15:21–28

Jesus withdraws to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman comes out, crying after him: “Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon.” He answers her not a word, and his disciples ask him to send her away.

“He would rather that we should pray for our own offenses ourselves, than that others should pray for us.” St. John Chrysostom

The woman does not argue her rights; she accepts the lowest place at the table and finds Christ waiting there. Her daughter’s healing is not won by pedigree or protest, but by a faith that empties itself before it is filled by Christ.

The test is not whether you belong to the household by birth or credential, but whether you are humble enough to receive what only grace can give: does your formation train the will to beg for the Beatific Vision, or to demand a place at the table by right?

WEEK AT A GLANCE

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THE CHAPEL OF GRACE: ENTERING THE ACADEMY

NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, AUGUST 9, 2026

Gospel Reading: Matthew 14:22-33

The night is black, and the sea is contrary. Jesus comes to them walking on the water, and Peter, at His word, steps out of the boat — his feet find the water solid, until the wind and waves take his eyes off Christ and he begins to sink.

“Such is human nature, in great trials ofttimes holding itself aright, and in lesser falling into fault.” (St. John Chrysostom)

Peter’s sinking is not a failure of strength but a failure of gaze and priority: where truth is not held fast, being itself gives way beneath the feet. The transcendentals do not divide their labor; they are convertible unity comprising the attributes of the Creator. Refuse one, and all recede together, and the water that had been solid by grace becomes only what it was by nature all along.

The test is not whether the wind and waves are strong but whether the eye holds fast: is your gaze fixed on the Christ who is Unity, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty converged, the direct and unmediated vision that alone will hold you above what the world insists must swallow you, or has it already dropped to the waves crashing on the beaches of our lives?

WEEK AT A GLANCE

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THE DOCTOR’S TAKE Tuesday, August 4, 2026

A billion-dollar monument to a presidency rises on Chicago’s South Side: a windowless gray monolith, no proportion to the human form beneath it, nothing in its mass that draws the eye toward anything beyond itself. Critics call it “bold.” It is not bold. It is “a tale told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” except for an ideological hatred of Western Civilization.

A foundational Pillar of the Great Western Tradition is beautiful architecture. Aquinas named the three conditions a thing must meet to be beautiful: integritas — wholeness; consonantia — right proportion; and claritas — the radiance of form shining through matter. A structure can satisfy the first two and still fail the third completely. Mass without radiance is not architecture. It is mere material arranged to impress, not to mean. This monstrosity is a fitting monument to a certain kind of legacy.

This building that cannot shine cannot speak. It can only loom.

THE CHAPEL OF GRACE: ENTERING THE ACADEMY

EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, AUGUST 2, 2026

Gospel Reading: Matthew 14:13-21

After He hears about the death of John the Baptists, He withdraws by boat to a deserted place, but crowds follow Him on foot from every town. Moved with pity, He heals their sick until evening falls. He takes five loaves and two fish, looks to heaven, blesses, breaks, and gives — five thousand men, besides women and children, eat until full, with twelve baskets of fragments left over.

“The five loaves are not multiplied into more, but fragments succeed to fragments; the substance growing whether upon the tables, or in the hands that took them up, I know not.”
(Hilary of Poitiers)

The bread multiplies without visible mechanism — no bakery, no market, only blessing poured into breaking. This is splendor formae: beauty as the trace of God's own generosity, exceeding what loaves and hands alone could produce.

The test is not whether beauty can be explained but whether it is trusted: is the unaccountable increase in your students’ souls received as grace ordering them toward the Beatific Vision, or dismissed as something to be managed?

WEEK AT A GLANCE

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THE DOCTOR’S TAKE Tuesday, July 28, 2026

Randi Weingarten says teaching kids to “think critically” is what saves them from tyranny. It sounds true until you catch a glimpse of what Weingarten means by “critical” and “thinking.” What Wiengarten means in reality prepares children precisely for subjection to tyranny, and it goes downhill from there when we discover her true end. For Weingarten truth is situational, subjective, and ideological.

Aquinas answers in De Veritate: truth is the conformity of thing and intellect, and all knowing is a convergence or conformation of the knower to the thing known. A mind trained in the public schools is a mind trained in the very propaganda the public schools claim to eschew. The nature and natural end of thinking is rejected as a prerequisite to the public school agenda. Minds trained in public schools are not liberated for truth, but rather prepared for the agenda.

A mind that resists every claim but is ordered toward no truth has not been freed — it has simply been emptied of one master to await another.

THE CHAPEL OF GRACE: ENTERING THE ACADEMY

SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, JULY 26, 2026

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13:44-52

Jesus speaks again in the briefest of parables: the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. The man who finds it hides it again, then sells everything he owns, in joy, to buy that field. A merchant searching for fine pearls finds one and does the same.

“This treasure is indeed found without cost; for the Gospel preaching is open to all, but to use and possess the treasure with its field we may not without price, for heavenly riches are not obtained without the loss of this world.” (St. Hilary of Poitiers)

St. Hilary names the paradox: grace is found without cost, and kept only at the cost of everything else. The will does not perform a calculation — it recognizes a good beyond comparison and reorganizes itself around its entirety.

The Question: The discernment is not to discover whether your school teaches virtuous behavior but whether it treats moral formation as a metaphysical necessity ordered toward the Beatific Vision — the will’s one adequate object — or as a behavioral supplement.

WEEK AT A GLANCE

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THE DOCTOR’S TAKE Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Randi Weingarten says fascists fear teachers because teachers save democracy. Listen closely: the final cause of education has quietly become the nation, not the soul.

Augustine answers in City of God XIX.24: a people is bound together by the common objects of its love, and a love that terminates in the earthly city (democracy), however noble its cause, is radically disordered. The true aim is called democracy, but this is a misnomer; the real aim is the ideology smuggled in by the word “democracy.” Teachers who “save democracy” are forming citizens for a manmade utopia, not good citizens for the City of Truth.

A democracy that asks its functionary teachers to save it has already named itself the thing worth dying for, and that is the oldest idolatry in the book.

THE CHAPEL OF GRACE: ENTERING THE ACADEMY

SIXTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME · JULY 19, 2026

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13:24–43

He sets before them a parable: a man sows good seed in his field, but while the household sleeps, an enemy sows tares among the wheat. They grow up together, and the servants ask whether to pull the weeds now. Not yet, he says — let both grow until the harvest.

“In the foregoing parable the Lord spoke to such as do not receive the word of God; here of those who receive a corrupting seed. This is the contrivance of the Devil, ever to mix error with truth.”
(Chrysostom, Hom. xlvi)

The wheat is wheat and the tares are tares, regardless of how either is named — and the harvest will distinguish them with a clarity no social consensus can provide. The City of Man erodes objective truth through relativism and constructivism, each refusing the adaequatio — the conformity of intellect to reality — the formation that makes the acquisition of truth possible.

The Question: The test is not whether a school speaks the language of truth but whether it presents truth as received — truth as intellect conformed to reality — or as relative, constructed by minds in negotiation, with the Beatific Vision reduced to one opinion among many?

WEEK AT A GLANCE

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THE DOCTOR’S TAKE Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Al Gore says climate change is “a moral and spiritual issue”, not political. He places it alongside the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. The secular apocalypse has found its prophet, and the prophet has found his gospel.

Augustine knew this move. In City of God XIV.28, he named libido dominandi (the lust for domination) as the organizing love of the earthly city. The earthly city does not abandon the language of morality; it baptizes its political program in it. When a temporal cause commands the register of eternal obligation, the City of Man has not become the City of Truth — it has dressed itself in stolen vestments.

A cause that cannot name God as its final end has not risen to the moral register — it has only borrowed its vocabulary. Al Gore is an empty prophet preaching the empty gospel message of Utopia.