This strange Holy Week has begun in tears: tears of frustration, tears of lament, and for so many who have been cruelly bereaves, tears of grief. It’s hard to see through tears, but sometimes its the only way to see. Tears may be the turning point, the springs of renewal, and to know you have [...]
The Cross is fearful to the natural eye and distasteful to the natural heart, but you have a new light and a new heart. We hold on to Jesus by God’s strength, not our own. This is not a time to be timid—Christian hope has the daring of a lover, a face “set like flint.” [...]
Meditation is a means to an end; contemplation is that end. It is our eternal destiny which we will enjoy with all we have known and loved in this life, and those whom we have never known, but who have loved Christ from the beginning. When most readers hear the expression “mystical spirituality” they usually [...]
Whereas Chaucer had depicted April as the bringer of life that lifts the hearts of the faithful, T.S. Eliot curses April for its cruelty in bringing back to life things and thoughts that were best left dead and buried. April is the cruellest month…. The opening words of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot are [...]
Believing is something radical, that is to say, different at its roots from “forming an opinion,” or “forming a conviction,” if you like. To make a judgment based on particular knowledge and inferences is a very important and, in innumerable areas, indispensable intellectual activity: but “believing” is a different process. In its content and unfolding, [...]
A constitution has to have formal structures and requirements if it is to do its job of imposing the rule of law on people in positions of power. But for these formal structures to work, both the people and the governors they choose must recognize that they are important. I was at a conference recently [...]
A noise echoes. It comes from the light, from the house, drowning out the sounds of darkness. Trumpets and the sound of the horn? Or is it the sound of those waters stirred up? I’ve left the plow, left my work belt, my hammer, my tools of meager existence—left my unmoving toil. And I took [...]
What was it about Augustine’s "Confessions" that made it so readable, or managed to endear its author to so many who read it? Might its appeal have had something to do with the fact that here was a great sinner who lived to regret his sins, and so completely reform his life as to become [...]
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 [...]
Land acknowledgement statements lack factual support: What was the historical nature of the “atrocity” mentioned in the statements? By what “violent and coercive means” was the land stolen? Morally charged language requires painstaking factual research and justification. We are all familiar with the ubiquitous land acknowledgement statement that has become a common feature of political [...]
To every man upon this earth/ Death cometh soon or late./ And how can man die better/ Than facing fearful odds,/ For the ashes of his fathers,/ And the temples of his gods. —Thomas Babington Macaulay How much resistance is a man—and a country—obligated to muster against insurmountable odds? This is the central question of [...]
Yuval Harari, in his latest book, "Nexus," believes that AI endangers the utopian dream of unbridled license that has long been the goal of countless revolutionaries on the left and libertarian anarchists on the right. Modernity is replete with philosophers who interpret reality through prisms. By simplifying their perceptions, such figures seek to change history. [...]
Antigone was verbally attacked by Creon for her choice, for her womanhood, and for her independent actions. Being able to withstand a barrage of abuse made Antigone’s resilience clear. My life is in no way a parallel of Antigone’s, yet thousands of years later, the virtues that rise within us by God’s grace and by [...]
Later generations of Catholic Church leaders continually held up Palestrina’s music as the model for what sacred music should be. Whenever church music seemed in a rickety state—as in the semi-operatic effusions of the Victorian era, or the folky derivatives of the late 20th century—Palestrina was always there as a lighthouse to guide us back [...]