JULY 19, 2026

“At the British Open, I had my opportunities, but the ball just didn’t want to go in the hole on the back nine.”

— Fuzzy Zoeller.

“When Ballesteros triumphed at the British Open in 1979, for his first major win, he hit so few fairways off the tee that he was often mistaken for a gallery marshall.”

— Dan Jenkins.

Ryan Fox shot to the top of the leaderboard by shooting -8 under par 62. He is the 3rd player to shoot a record tying low round in the tournament. He and Si Woo Kim are tied for 2nd place, 2 shots behind Sam Burns, who finished the 3rd round at -10 under par.

Lucas Herbert, Tommy Fleetwood, and Jackson Suber are lurking. So is Scottie Scheffler who cannot make a birdie putt if you place his ball on the cup’s rim. All day, he was so close, yet so far away.

Bryson DeChambeau did tee off. He made few friends among his fellow competitors, the R&A, and the volunteers after his behavior on Friday. But he was well received by the fans, which proves there is no accounting for taste.

Today’s television coverage begins at 4:00 a.m. on USA network, and moves to NBC at 7:00 a.m. Someone will be named The Open Champion at the end of the day. But will yet another golfer shoot 62? And if he does, will it matter?

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Today we continue reading S. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and in fact, from the same chapter as last Sunday. 

Last Sunday, S. Paul outlined the principles of the sacrament of Holy Baptism. When we enter the waters of baptism, we are buried along with Christ: the “old man” dies. Our former way of life, enslaved to sin and ruled by disordered passions, is put to death. Then, rising from those mystical waters, we are raised with Christ to a new and transformed life.

All of this happens objectively, and is a solemn promise from God. Thus the term “sacrament.” This word was adopted in the early Church from its use in Roman society; sacramentum meant “solemn oath.” This term was used both in the military, when a soldier pledged his loyalty to the consul or emperor, and in the legal system when an amount of money was deposited with the courts as a pledge or bond. In the Christian life, the sacrament is God’s sure pledge to us, and our pledge of faithful obedience to Him.

The challenge is how to live into the objective reality brought about by our baptism into Christ, and to understand its practical implications in our day-to-day life. 

To bring this point home, S. Paul uses the analogy of slavery. We are either enslaved to sin or we are slaves in the service of God. Our experience bears out the truth of this analogy. We know that when a particular sin has its grip on us, it seems we can do nothing to shake it. Think of someone who suffers from an addiction to drugs or alcohol. He lives for that addiction. So it is with us when our besetting sin begins to dominate our lives. Whether avarice (greed), gluttony or lust, it’s hard to shake off their demonic hold.

S. Paul reminds us that sin is never content to remain where it begins. For as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity. Sin has a way of deepening its hold. Before we were restored in Christ, we naturally drifted from one vice to another, often into sins more grievous than those with which we first began. What begins as idle gossip may eventually become malicious slander and the destruction of another’s good name.

Once again, we are reminded of the twofold work of our salvation. First comes the saving work accomplished by Christ upon the Cross, made present to us in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. This is wholly His work, to which we can add nothing. As S. Paul writes elsewhere: “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” Christ, the spotless Lamb of God, confronted our ancient enemies of sin, death, and the devil, and triumphed over them by His Cross. Through His victory, we are given both the power and the freedom to live as God created us to live.

Yet the Christian life does not end there. The Holy Ghost continues His work within us, the work of sanctification, or growth in holiness. This divine life, first bestowed in Holy Baptism and strengthened in Confirmation, is nourished through the sacraments and grows within us as the Holy Ghost prepares us for eternal communion with God.

This work of sanctification, however, calls for our willing cooperation. God never forces Himself upon us—not even in the matter of holiness. As we hunger and thirst for righteousness and long to be more closely united to Him, He responds by pouring out the grace we need through the sacramental life of the Church. Little by little, our hearts are conformed to His own, until, as the Psalmist says: “our hearts are knit unto Him.”

The Collect for Trinity VII beautifully gathers these themes into a single prayer: Graft in our hearts the love of thy Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of thy great mercy keep us in the same. May that prayer become the sincere desire of each one of us, that, having died and risen with Christ in Baptism, we may daily walk in newness of life.

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J.D. Vance gets it right: Christianity belongs in government

Faith provides the moral framework secular politics cannot replace

BY:          Everett Piper, The Washington Times (July 12, 2026).

Recently, Vice President J.D. Vance granted a series of interviews to The New York Times, USA Today, Fox News and others in which he openly acknowledged that his Christianity influences every aspect of his life: his politics, sense of duty, ambition and moral priorities.

In one interview, he said, “My Christian beliefs encourage me to concentrate on the positive.” He went on to explain how his faith in Christ helps him resist the temptations of “power” and redirect his carnal impulses toward service rather than self.

In another appearance, Mr. Vance stated that he believes he has providentially been placed in office “for a brief period of time to do the most amount of good for God and for the country” that he can.

Yet in another, the vice president said history shows clearly that the United States has a Christian foundation and that “Christianity is America’s creed,” one that has provided the “moral language” for America’s public and private life for the past 250 years.

In all these interviews, the vice president was consistent. For him, Christianity is not just a Sunday affair or a “private matter” that he keeps to himself and confines to the four walls of the church. To the contrary, Mr. Vance’s religion is an all-consuming, life-transforming, culture-changing worldview that, if pushed out of the public square, will leave a moral vacuum for both individual citizens and our body politic as a whole.

In summary, Mr. Vance sees the Christian faith as the foundation of America’s moral and social order, diametrically opposed to the radical secularism of the left. He argues that our nation is dramatically weakened by excluding it.

He is right, and he stands in good company.

James Russell Lowell, 19th-century abolitionist, Harvard professor and first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, once said, “The worst kind of religion is no religion at all, and these men living in ease and luxury, indulging themselves in the amusement of going without religion, may be thankful that they live in lands where the gospel they neglect has tamed the beastliness and ferocity of the men who, but for Christianity, might long ago have eaten their carcasses like the South Sea Islanders, or cut off their heads and tanned their hides like the monsters of the French Revolution.”

He went on: “When the microscopic search of skepticism, which had hunted the heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a Creator, has turned its attention to human society and has found a place on this planet ten miles square where a decent man can live in comfort and security, supporting and educating his children unspoiled and unpolluted; a place where age is reverenced, infancy respected, manhood respected, womanhood honored, and human life held in due regard — when skeptics can find such a place ten miles square on this globe, where the gospel of Christ has not gone and cleared the way and laid the foundation and made decency and security possible, it will then be in order for the skeptical literati to move thither and then ventilate their views. But so long as these men are dependent upon the religion which they discard for every privilege they enjoy, they may well hesitate a little before they seek to rob the Christian of his hope, and humanity of its faith, in that Savior who alone has given to man that hope of life eternal which makes life tolerable and society possible, and robs death of its terrors and the grave of its glooms.”

Hilaire Belloc, the early 20th-century essayist, poet, polemicist and historian, agreed with Mr. Lowell. He said: “The modern world imagines that it has outgrown religion. It has done nothing of the kind. It has merely forgotten it. And because it has forgotten it, it no longer understands itself. Men do not realize that the whole framework of their moral judgments, their political habits, and even their intellectual methods [were] formed within a Christian society and cannot exist long outside it. When that framework breaks, they will not find themselves enlightened, but bewildered; not free, but enslaved; not rational, but confused.”

Belloc, Lowell and Mr. Vance are essentially saying the same thing John Adams said in the earliest days of the birth of our nation: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

We should all be thankful that our current vice president is willing to suffer ridicule and mockery from our culture’s political intelligentsia and educated elites by reminding us of the obvious: Religion should never be a private matter.

Without Christianity in the public realm, our country — indeed, every country — will inevitably become a hell on earth.

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Islam has no place in America’s public life

Our nation was founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic

BY:          Don Feder, The Washington Times (July 12, 2026).

What starts in California usually does not stop in California, sad to say. An effort is underway in the state to make two Muslim holidays — Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha — state holidays and to teach Islam in public schools.

Breakout sessions on infidel beheading are optional.

AB 2017, which passed the California Assembly by a 64-1 vote late last month, would allow public schools to close for these holidays and hold “exercises” celebrating some of the holiest days of the Muslim year.

Compare this with the treatment of Christmas and Easter, which have been secularized by transforming them into winter and spring breaks. Hanukkah and Passover? Forget it. Islam is the left’s pet religion.

If the bill passes, an “Arabian Nights” version of Islam will be taught to gullible schoolchildren, who will be told exactly what groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations want them to learn.

There will be no discussion of how Islam was spread by the sword from India to Spain in the century after Muhammad’s death. Today’s holy war against African Christians will be strictly off limits.

In his 1996 book, “The Clash of Civilizations,” historian Samuel Huntington spoke of “Islam’s bloody borders,” meaning that wherever there is religious conflict anywhere in the world, it invariably involves Islam versus another faith: Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism or Buddhism. The outcome often is not pretty.

Absent will be any discussion of the 2001 World Trade Center attack, the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shootings or the 2025 New Orleans pickup truck attack.

The rise of attacks on Jews parallels the growth of the U.S. Muslim population. According to the FBI, 69% of religion-based hate crimes are antisemitic, while only 2% of the U.S. population is Jewish.

The California public school push is part of a broad-based effort to normalize Islam in American life. There were 1,200 mosques in America in 2001. Today, there are 3,100. I guess demolishing the World Trade Center was not bad for business.

There are Muslim planned communities in Texas. Boston and Buffalo held flag raisings for Somali Independence Day this year. Without Somalis, who would have stolen $1 billion from federal aid programs in Minnesota?

There are currently four Muslim members of Congress, including the rabidly anti-American Rep. Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Democrat, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Michigan Democrat.

They will soon be joined by Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Haitian convert to Islam who just won the Democratic primary in a deep-blue congressional district in New York City. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayad — who refuses to say whether he believes Israel has a right to exist — is running to become the first Muslim senator in U.S. history.

Ms. Chevalier led the Columbia University boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign. Her platform calls for abolishing police and prisons and ending deportations, even for convicted murderers.

On the other hand, in Iran, protesters are hanged from cranes and women are lashed for appearing in public without a hijab.

Religious tolerance is unknown in the Muslim world (witness Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gaza Strip under Hamas). Dissent is brutally repressed.

There is no room for Islam in America’s public life. Our nation was founded on a Judeo-Christian worldview handed down at Sinai and interpreted in Jerusalem, Rome and Geneva.

Some of our earliest settlements were religious: the Pilgrims and Puritans in Massachusetts, the Quakers and Amish in Pennsylvania, and the Catholics in Maryland.

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were overwhelmingly Orthodox Christians. The Constitution was dated on “the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven.” “Our Lord” does not refer to Allah.

Christianity has played a central role in shaping our national identity. In the 18th century, Colonial churches preached revolution against the British crown. In the 19th century, Northern churches were bastions of abolitionism. In the 20th century, they worked to end segregation.

Many of the young men who landed in Normandy on D-Day carried pocket editions of the Christian or Jewish Bible, not the Quran. They wore crosses or Stars of David. They did not carry prayer rugs.

To endure, a nation must have a shared vision. In America, that vision comes from our biblical heritage: human dignity, equality before the law and the protection of civil liberties.

Islam is as alien to American life as sexual morality is to Graham Platner.

GFK