September 11th, 2007
The always deeply insightful papal retreat master, Fr. Cantalamessa, has written the best piece I’ve read on Mother Teresa’s “Dark Night of the Soul” as revealed in her newly published letters.
Here’s an excerpt, relevant to the world of Catholic letters:
The world of today knows a new category of people: the atheists in good faith, those [...]
September 6th, 2007
The New York Times has an excellent editorial about the recently published letters of Mother Teresa. (There’s a nice mention of Bl. Flannery, too.) Here’s an excerpt:
To the extent people ever tried to project themselves into the mind of Mother Teresa, they might have pictured a Gothic vault washed in dazzling beams of saintly conviction. [...]
June 27th, 2007
More Harry Potter theories anon, but I simply had to draw your attention to one of the most incisive book reviews I’ve ever read, by Eugene McCarraher, about Christopher Hitchens’ entry in the current anti-religion publishing fad.
Here’s an excerpt, after commenting on Hitchens’ reputation as a brilliant writer and fearless critic:
…as Mark Twain once mused, [...]
June 21st, 2007
here’s an article in today’s Catholic World News reporting that an Italian archeologist believes that the cup Christ used at the Last Supper may be buried beneath the walls of one of the seven great Roman Italian basilicas, St. Lawrence Outside the Walls.
Dan and I visited there as part of our pilgrimage to Rome in [...]
June 19th, 2007
This just in from the Catholic News Agency:
London, Jun 19, 2007 / 11:49 am (CNA).- The British Secret Service, MI6, has published an alarming report in the magazine Sunday Express revealing that some 200 million Christians in 60 countries around the world are at risk of suffering persecution.
Click here to read the rest of the [...]
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Joan of Arc: A Life (Penguin Lives) by Mary Gordon
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The concentration resulting fom a framework of theology and philosophy, [T.S. Eliot] says, is one of the reasons ‘why Dante is a classic and Blake only a poet of genius.’ The intellectual disorder of the nineteenth century gave the poet no such system, indeed it imposed upon him the necessity of being at once an artist and an original speculative thinker—an impossible combination. Thus the effort to construct for himself a workable plan out of the odds and ends of the wreckage of philosophical systems not infrequently resulted in grotesque and unsteady structures, the early collapse of which left him a prey to despair and frustration.
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Kelly Hatzenbihler on 