In Welsh, “Capel-y-Ffin” means “chapel at the boundaries.” It is an apt name, not only because of its location in the border land between Wales and England, but also because it is a place where the boundaries between religion and reality, monasticism and morality, chastity and carnality, and (it must be said) sanity and insanity [...]
Seeing the works of the early decades of the twentieth century by Robert Hugh Benson and Hilaire Belloc as part of a living tradition of historical scholarship, we might hope that the revival of interest in their historical perspectives might prove inspirational to new generations of pioneering cultural figures in the twenty-first century. The reception [...]
A Victorian cleric named Joseph Leycester Lyne dreamed of establishing an Anglican monastery at Llanthony, Wales. Lyne took the name of Father Ignatius and has gone down in history as one of the most eccentric and and energetic of all Anglo-Catholic pretenders. Ignatius of Llanthony During the first years of my quarter of [...]
What do we know of Catherine of Aragon, the first to suffer the pains of the so-called Reformation? All Catholics know the Salve Regina, the “Hail, Holy Queen,” the Marian antiphon sung in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven, who is without doubt and without question the most sung of all the [...]
Starting just 30 years after the Crucifixion, Catholic England produced remarkable figures, including lesser-known luminaries like Bishop Robert Grosseteste, who pioneered the scientific method. In my book Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England, I sought to present a panoramic overview of two thousand years of English history, from the first century to the [...]
Poetry, often called the thinking man's meme, has faded from popular culture. Still, Catholics could greatly benefit from exploring the works of poets who lived heroic, faith-filled lives. Were one to conduct a survey of modern-day Americans, taken at random, it is likely that not one in a hundred would have heard of the poet Richard [...]
Once Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in 1570, there was a target on all Catholics, especially priests. The Catholic gentry of England put everything on the line to give shelter to the priests, particularly by the construction of hiding places in their large country houses. Here is the story of my trip to some [...]
Hilaire Belloc’s “The Contrast” is a neglected study of America and Europe after the Great War. His sadness over the utter failure of Europeans to embrace their cultural patrimony and stand independently explains his later sympathy for Franco and Salazar, and his initial interest in Mussolini. The unimaginative always place a wall of separation between [...]
The experience of nostalgia is a feeling of beauty’s remoteness, but only because it is so far in the future. It is hope. I went for a long walk in Oxford the other night. The city, of course, is always enchanting, but in early summer and at night, it is so the most. When summer [...]
St. Withburga Over the centuries, the English have been something of a curse to the Irish. English rulers, such as Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Oliver Cromwell, have sought to impose their will on the people of Ireland, often through the tyrannical use of terror on a defenseless population. There is, however, one [...]
Classical music comes to us from a very long and very human tradition. The concert hall thus should be the embodiment of classical music’s character: It should above all feel human, feel familiar, feel knowable, and feel intimate as often as it feels exalted. Hot on the heels of what was surely disappointing news for Maris [...]
The United Kingdom’s Labour Party government is presenting a bill to abolish the hereditary lords from the upper chamber of Parliament. Hereditary lords are those House of Lords’ members who inherit the right to sit in the upper House based on services rendered to the realm. Many storied families have retained this right for generations. [...]
Michael Kurek's English Symphony is his third symphony and perhaps his best, surpassing even the magic and majesty of his second and, as its name suggests, taking the primary world of England as its creative wellspring. When Britain had an Empire The sun would never set, But the sun set over England And Englishmen forget [...]
The recent publication of a private letter written by King Charles III in 1998, when he was Prince of Wales, is causing quite a stir. Written to a friend, Dudley Poplak, it expresses King Charles’ disdain for the imposition of scientism on agriculture, which is itself of interest, but also expresses his scorn for the [...]