04 Sep Reflections on the Publican and Pharisee
The Publican and the Pharisee are proverbial in Christian consciousness. And so we imagine that we know immediately and instinctively the contrast that is being shown us: hypocrisy, on the...
01 Sep Kurelek: The Journey to Faith
[Note: This essay is basically an extraction of interesting elements from the first portion of Kurelek, A Biography (1986) by Patricia Morley]. [caption id="attachment_17307" align="alignleft" width="215"] Hailstorm in Alberta[/caption] Bill Kurelek was...
30 Aug Reflections on the Fascination of Apocalypse
Our culture generates countless end-of-the-world scenarios, countless representations of apocalypse. They can be settings for comedy or drama or horror; they can also be incitements to political, ecological or religious...
25 Aug Reflections on Sanctity
What is sanctity? There are of course various ways in which we can try to think about it. One is this. Sanctity is our participation in God. What does this...
23 Aug Mysterious West
Early Irish poetry can be disorienting, to a poor modernist like me. I refer to verse from the sixth to ninth centuries, in Gaelic and in Latin (often with an...