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 one hand, and humility, on the other. But perhaps things aren’t quite so simple. Let’s take the Pharisee first of all. Is...
[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 born in 1927 to Ukrainian pioneers who had settled near Edmonton, Alberta. Journalists dubbed him "the people's painter", but he...
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 mobilization. At one level we know very well what it is to contemplate the violent unravelling of cosmic and social...
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 mean? St John calls us the children of God. This means something more than that we belong to God and...
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 irrepressible brogue) — what the Irish call “Old,” to distinguish from their “Mediaeval” verse in the tenth through, say, the...