The self-absorption that is so prominently on display in the present day precludes such transcendence. It involves an inflation of the self that results in the eclipse of all phenomena transcendent to it. The question that materializes in this age is not so much, what do I matter, but what does anything else matter but [...]
My mother’s unrelenting message to me was: Keep your head, keep your feet planted on the ground, muster courage in the face of the ambiguous and the unknown, do what is in front of you, and by all means possible take care of your responsibilities. I’ve had more vaccinations for more virulent diseases than most [...]
A ride on the river and a small-town celebration are a perfect way to spend a summer Sunday. “Dave, let’s go rafting.” It was my friend Ujae (pronounced You-jay), one of those fabulous immigrants (he’s Korean) who love America passionately and understand that it is both still a place of opportunity for one who hustles [...]
Earlier this summer, I was walking in our backyard, and I saw one of the brothers picking up cicadas from the sidewalk and putting them back on the trees they had fallen off, and it struck me that cicadas were a good image for the spiritual life. If King David can write in the Psalms [...]
As the shadow of COVID lifts, let’s hope the thriving business of literary pilgrimages will regain its buoyancy and help us connect the stories that motivate and inspire us with the reality of today’s world. I attended the same high school in Pennsylvania as John Updike. His father bought his pants from my Dad’s clothing [...]
The air is crisp, the berries have turned brown, The final harvest has been taken in, The once new leaves have dropped from the Green Man’s crown. And the Summer’s Sun has come to rest and dim. […]
The pervasive “world” is a man-made complex of ambitions and obligations, a dense social and cultural and financial web that captures us and estranges our experience from the primal realities of earth and sky. We need to remind ourselves of the blessedness that can come even in the midst of the busiest days, that subtle [...]
If the universe were a swarm, there would be no universe. That swarm, that self-caused changing unit, that Godless movable infinite thing would destroy the necessary condition of its own existence and persistence: the individuals that constitute it. Why, then, does modern man insist on not seeing this? Why does he choose rage over reality? I [...]
Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. […]
Effoliating foliage, he haunts His local habitation. The tutelary Spirit, ripener of wildest blackberry, Protector of the bees’ humblest wants. […]
As this strange summer of a strange year comes to an end, I am reminded of ordinary realities and experiences that now appear in a new light. At our college, classes started back up, and I cannot recall a happier sense of new beginning, partly because this, too, has been defamiliarized. On Sunday of this [...]
Language is at the heart of Creation. Because we are created in the image of God who spoke and created intelligible matter, our language mirrors Creation in a hazy, incomplete way. Our speech calls into existence names and creates a narrative to link together our experiences in a coherent way. A life without words is [...]
Omissions of formal and final causes in the modern scientific project lead to a sense of meaninglessness. Bringing them back allows a crucial reinterpretation of the evidence of modern science: that matter carries within it its own divine purposiveness, and it moves by its nature into greater and greater complexities of order and beauty. This [...]
In the era of scientific advancement, contemplating the sublime, both in nature and art, remains more necessary than ever. Works of art that build a sub-creation on scripture, exploiting the fullness of natural realism inherent in it, attain a very rare sublimity and draw the mind toward God. These waters must be troubled before they [...]