“Rakitin,” [Alyosha Karamazov] suddenly said loudly and firmly, “don’t taunt me with having rebelled against my God. I don’t want to hold any anger against you, and therefore you be kinder, too. I’ve lost such…
And now a lawyer stood up and, to test him, asked, ‘Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the Law? What is your reading of…
The love of our neighbor in all its fulness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” –Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say [George Herbert’s Love] over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I…
Meditation is concentration, and concentration becomes, finally, consecration. –Sri Eknath Easwaran, Passage Meditation: Bringing the Deep Wisdom of the Heart into Daily Life
With the story of Thérèse, and only with her story, we see a fully realized mystic and saint portrayed as someone living at the center of a web of intense relationships: embedded, that is, in…
This little incident of my childhood is a summary of my whole life; later on when perfection was set before me, I understood that to become a saint one had to suffer much, seek out…
1) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 2) C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity 3) E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed 4) Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 5) Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien 6) Ralph McInerny, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You 7) Dorothy Sayers, The Whimsical Christian 8) J….
What I call “another sort of learning” is the finding and reading those seminal books that take us to the truth and order of things. ––James V. Schall, Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught
A God-fearing Orthodox peasant talking about thieves, with a shrug of the shoulders, as one talks about a social necessity: “It’s a busy life—there’s always a shop or a bank to rob. And where would…