At his farm, my grandfather had rigged what he called his “snow ropes”: hand-hold-by-hand-hold, the snow ropes prevent getting lost and wandering off in who knows what direction only to freeze and be found come spring. I’m interested in “snow ropes” and, well, mysticism and religious language. The mystic says, that “God is a blinding [...]
Can one still be an aspirant in old age? That unknown fourteenth-century author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" wrote his text for a 24-year-old aspirant. There’s a moment in the book in which the author writes about how we cannot think our way to God, since God can only be loved. So we have to [...]
Who, then, was Gabriel Marcel, and why spend time on a philosopher who, unlike his contemporaries, never refused to recognize the “ontological” mystery? It could have been that my conversion was like an answer from Heaven to a prayer that [my mother] made without knowing that some days later she would leave this earth. Shaken [...]
The times lacerate us, crucify us. Can we tease out the meanings, or are the meanings beyond us? Someone has to watch while the world is burning and toll the bell. Is there still the possibility for love in the ruins? (from a memoir, The Man Who Balanced A Tea Cup On His Head and other [...]
The more genuine sources of order come not from opinion-makers but from custom, convention, and continuity. The appeal is to the three parts that make an associated sensibility: heart, imagination, and intellect, and all three are calculating and decision-making, and all three tutored by the eternal standards of what is right and what is wrong. [...]
I remember the excitement the day the crates arrived and were carefully opened, and what emerged was overwhelming. What was beginning to happen was a unique partnership combining all the art forms: poetry, painting, music, and theater into one evening’s performance. She was British-chilly until I brought out the gin: one ice cube and a [...]
Historian Francis Parkman was a romantic, and readers today might be skeptical that any such person as Isaac Jogues could have existed as Parkman “imagined” him. And imagine him he did, from the vantage point of enthusiasm toward the past and a warm regard for the heroic. There's serendipity here in as much as my [...]
Even many fans of Flannery O'Connor are unaware that she wrote the introduction to a story by Dominican nuns about a sick girl they cared for until her death at age twelve. Mary Ann Long's extraordinarily vibrant spirit brought a remarkable interior beauty to the convent, a place beset with so much suffering. This slim [...]
What mattered to writer Charles Péguy was the future and restoring the Christian mystique, “a mystical spring flowing, a source of love, of life, of grace, an eternal spring, inexhaustible, nourishing the world, overflowing onto the age, inundating the world, an eternally mystical spring temporally in the world.” And once more he went down and [...]
Best known as a novelist and least known as a philosopher, Iris Murdoch was a contributor to the literature and the philosophical thought of the past century. To read her is to follow a process by which she emerged with international stature. "Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues." —Iris Murdoch, [...]
John Henry Newman owned a “long view,” especially in relation to the development of Christian doctrine over the centuries. Much lesser known, and fitting nicely with his doctrinal works, are two novels which own equal importance for Newman scholars: the semi-autobiographical "Loss and Gain," and the historical romance "Callista." Now it must be observed that [...]
What’s implicit in Henry James’ works is his familiarity with matters Catholic. What’s implicit is also subtle, so that Protestant and Catholic readers alike might enjoy reading about such matters. What I understand by manners . . . is culture’s hum and buzz of implication . . . . They are hinted at by small [...]
In the years between 1939 and 1949, T.S. Eliot’s task was to enshrine Christian martyrdom and to restore poetic drama. His most popular drama was “The Cocktail Party,” a comedy which develops dramatically into a philosophically darker spiritual trial and wrestles with the theme of atonement. In one of his manifesto letters to William Carlos [...]
Russell Kirk Mr. Birzer’s recent archeological dig into Dr. Kirk’s speech-writing unearthed a memory from now a quarter-century ago plus one, 1986, spring to be exact. Rusty Nichols, then Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Hillsdale College called me to his office. The purpose was to discuss some help for Russell Kirk who was writing [...]