Today’s One-Liner (#298)
Philothea, since you wish to live a devout life you must not only cease to sin but you must also purify your heart of all affection for sin. –Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction to the…
Category: Commonplace book
Edith Stein at the Westerbork Camp, Destination: Auschwitz
Amongst the prisoners who were brought in on the 5th of August, Sister Benedicta stood out on account of her calmness and composure. The distress in the barracks and the stir caused by the new…
Today’s One-Liner (#297)
I take it for granted that we read what are rightly called “great books”—Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, the Bible, St. Augustine, some Church fathers, St. Thomas, Shakespeare, and into the…
Things Have Changed
The Bible has profound things to tell us, things we clearly ought to know. We now have students in class, even those who have gone to church or synagogue all their lives, who have not…
Seeing
I found there was great bliss in just watching Ma. Her simple movements and actions displayed a freedom, dignity and beauty that cannot be described in words, and filled the beholder with a strange, inexplicable…
The Bliss with Books
Back and forth from my desk to my shelves, ten, twenty, thirty times a day. The sources swirl around me. I am drugged by books. The sweet savor rises from the pages. A delirium of…
Today’s One-Liner (#295)
Studying Torah day and night means positioning oneself at every moment to acquire Torah, which is itself a function of bearing the burden of another. –Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of…
Today’s One-Liner (#294)
The Church’s claim is that we reach our fulfillment as human beings not by asserting ourselves, but by giving ourselves—by making ourselves into the gift to others that life itself is to us. –George Weigel,…
Epigraphs
One use of his commonplaces was to supply mottoes for his own and others’ periodical essays. Johnson’s adeptness in providing epigraphs suggests something about how he read and filed away crystals of literature that…
Today’s One-Liner (#293)
This is that conquest of the world and of ourselves, which has been always considered as the perfection of human nature; and this is only to be obtained by fervent prayer, steady resolution, and frequent…