If Christmas is anything, it is a revolution of the heart against the tit-for-tat of this world, against the demands of this world for balancing the scales and righting every wrong with a hard justice. Ultimately, if this world is saved, it will be mercy, not justice, that saves it. I. When the Outlandish Is [...]
The birth of a child is not a completely new beginning but it changes everything. It is a revelation that transforms us. The baby existed before, but now we can see its face. In this case, the unique case of Jesus, it is the face that God turns towards us, and also the face that [...]
There are several attitudes towards Christmas, Some of which we may disregard: The social, the torpid, the patently commercial, The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight), And the childish — which is not that of the child For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel Spreading its wings at the summit [...]
Man may not live by bread alone, but a goodly baked bread goes a long way to rendering us joyful and content. Bread-making is both a sensual and spiritual experience. It satisfies a yearning for deeper bonding among friends and family, and it restores us to a less stressed, more thankful awareness of life. Many [...]
The man in the shop was very old and broken. When I put down the money, he pushed it feebly away. “No, no,” he said vaguely. “I never have. We are rather old-fashioned here.” “Good heavens!” I said. “What can you mean? Why, you might be Father Christmas.” “I am Father Christmas,” he said apologetically. [...]
In my Advent Anthology from Canterbury Press Waiting on the Word, we come to the last of the Seven Great O Antiphons, which was sung on either side of the Magnificat on Christmas Eve, O Emmanuel, O God with us. This is the antiphon from which our lovely Advent hymn takes its name. It was also this final [...]
Editor’s Note: Author Siobhan Nash-Marshall recently passed away. Please enjoy this wonderful essay, one of many she penned for us. I have escaped the City, as I do every year in Summer. I know that this sounds trite, and perhaps even a tad snobbish, like a line from The Great Gatsby. But that heat that [...]
The poem I have chosen for December 17th in my Advent Anthology from Canterbury Press Waiting on the Word is my own sonnet “O Sapientia,” the first in a sequence of seven sonnets on the seven great ‘O’ antiphons which I shall be reading to you each day between now and the 23rd of December. You [...]
Constantino Brumidi’s fresco is less a deification of George Washington than it is a creative recording of his achievements and his legacy for our nation’s politicians. That the U.S. possesses its own rich history in art and boasts a series of internationally acclaimed painters is no surprise. Indeed, a walk through the Art Institute of [...]
Such are the power and relevance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's words, that we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we did not engage with his memories in an effort to connect them with our own, transforming them into something new. And, happily, this is what the authors of "Solzhenitsyn and American Culture" do. “Own only [...]
John Milton’s “ancient liberty” is not the liberalism of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, where the telos governing human liberty is dispensed with. Rather, “Paradise Lost” cultivates Christian virtues by reclaiming an ancient liberty within the traditional epic verse form and by returning to that which is first or most ancient: Divine Will. The opening [...]
Let us remember this day in Advent as a reminder of the true spirit of Saint Nicholas—a valiant defender of the faith, a tender-hearted lover of the poor and a kindly, generous soul, who saw that the true message of Christ’s nativity was that unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the [...]
There is really no “unknown” Mozart these days. For the 225th anniversary of his death in 2016, the Universal record company released the newest of several (!) complete editions of every note Mozart wrote. So, everything we have written by the “miracle which God let be born in Salzburg” is readily available to twenty-first century [...]
For Jane Austen’s heroines, marriage is the end towards which their virtuous lives are directed. Above all other blessings Oh! God, for ourselves, and our fellow-creatures, we implore Thee to quicken our sense of thy Mercy in the redemption of the World, of the Value of that Holy Religion in which we have been brought [...]