Why can’t we all live forever? It seems a terrible flaw in the fabric of the world—that death haunts us from the moment we are born, injecting a note of tragedy into everything. And yet how could it be otherwise, if reproduction is equally a part of the fabric of space-time? An image of the [...]
In a book on Catholic social doctrine, published just after Easter, I found myself integrating a lifetime’s work on a range of topics, from liturgy to politics, from sex to economics. Not As the World Gives aims to show us the nature of society by showing us ourselves. But that is the biggest reality of [...]
From my wheelchair I noticed that there was only one letter different between these two words—the word for the study of cancer, and for the study of being. That posed me a challenge. What is this difference? What is cancer, and what is being? Why is there no “Ontology Ward” in my local hospital? Would [...]
As a civilization we have abandoned our belief in the archetypes—not just of man and woman but even of good and evil. We’ve been trying to chart our course without them. But they haven’t gone away, and an archetype spurned can be a dangerous thing. In his famous press conference on the plane coming back from Rio, [...]
Chesterton recognized that heart and hearth, work and worth, are all of a piece. Human flourishing is found in families, human wholeness in holiness. Civilization depends on faith—faith both in the transcendent horizon that many call God, but also faith in reason, and in the ability of human intelligence to grasp objective truth. by [...]
I have written here about the salvation to be found in an English tea ceremony. Coffee on the other hand, I have always thought of as an American drink. I was introduced to great-tasting coffee a long time ago in Vermont, by a man who brewed it in test-tubes and fed it through an enormous [...]
There is a book that caught my attention and may well hold it to the end of my life. Written by an English hermit—Priest-Monk Silouan, a convert to Orthodoxy now living in a retreat on the Shropshire hills—Wisdom Songs is a collection of “Centuries”, chapters of a hundred meditations each, on a series of spiritual [...]
There is a perfect cup of tea. An Englishman knows it can occur most easily at 4 pm (or, say, 8 am), when the solar system is aligned in a particular way. When in a foreign country, he looks around hopefully at five minutes to 4 in case tea is beginning to appear, but he [...]
Will the world end with a bang, or just a whimper, as T.S. Eliot predicted? Or will nobody notice at all? An eerie silence, as everyone listens to an endless stream of digital music on their iPods. Gradually, step by step, with the advance of computer technology, real things are being replaced by images of [...]
To what extent are the differences between man and woman rooted in the soul, rather than just the body? If the soul is the “form” of the body, one might assume that masculinity and femininity are characteristics of the soul before they are of the body. Yet the tradition of patristic and medieval commentary on [...]
Like a house illuminated by natural light from the five windows of the senses, our soul receives information from outside. But how do we “process” this information? How do we arrive at the forms that enable us to identify what we see, the constants and universals that enable us to recognize a flower or a [...]
Michael S. Schneider’s wonderful work A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe, which I recommended in Beauty for Truth’s Sake, is linked to a lot of classroom teaching that Michael has done over the years. This has now been captured in his superb DVD called Constructing the Universe, which could be an important resource for teachers and parents [...]
The Devil’s first sin was not the temptation of Eve, but preceded the creation of the Garden. He “tried to destroy by violence before he succeeded in ruining by fraud.” You might like to compare Tolkien’s “Ainulindale” (the Elvish account of the creation of the world through music, in The Silmarillion), with the following meditation on the Exercises [...]
G.K. Chesterton And at this I cursed them and kicked at them and made an exhibition of myself; having made myself the champion of the Lion’s Tooth, with a dandelion rampant on my crest. Gilbert Keith Chesterton (d. 1936), who wrote these words, was an English “man of letters” – a novelist, journalist, [...]