11 Mar For the Map Year: Frank Sheed and “The Map of Life”
The traveller through a strange country usually gets vivid impressions of individual things, but only a confused impression of the country in its totality. He remembers this mountain and that stream and the other village, but how one is related to the other, and the general winding of roads that...
08 Mar Benedictine “option”
Let us revise the “Benedict option,” named by Rod Dreher, and proposed by him and many others. They invite us, in effect, to head for the hills, or to the nearest virtual equivalents; to separate ourselves, in mind if not in body, from the depraved society in which we find...
06 Mar Ye cloude of unknowyng
Among books of spiritual direction, that are short, and in English, my favourite is probably The Cloud of Unknowing — written in Chaucer’s day by some anonymous cleric, perhaps a Carthusian. He is not without personality, so that once we notice it we realize that a second treatise, The Book...
03 Mar Dark gentleman of the Sonnets
My head is full of Shakespeare Sonnets at the moment, from trying to teach this author to startlingly intelligent and perceptive young seminarians. The poet’s allusions to the ruined monasteries that punctuate the Tudor countryside are … poignant at the least. The Sonnets were published late in Shakespeare’s career (1609) —...