Category: Commonplace book

So Long Ago and So Modern

St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity…

Dis-ease and Cure

The gospel invites us to enter the mystery of our own disabilities, hidden or otherwise. We need not fear those moments of being secret “lepers” ourselves, those parts of our being we hide away and…

Living the Beatitudes

Even when they call us mad,When they call us subversives and communistsAnd all the epithets they put on us,We know that we only preach The subversive witness of the Beatitudes,Which have turned everything upside downTo proclaim…

Ask the Good Sisters

Would the re-sacralization of the priesthood pull the Church back from her work with the poor and the friendless? Would we become a house of self-regarding bourgeois pietism? Well, seek out for yourself a slum…

Up to Us

If you’re looking for a silver lining in these years of chaos and rancor, consider this: We now know, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the calvary ain’t coming.  We know that our elected officials,…

“What’s Wrong with the World?”

Around the turn of the last century, a prominent London newspaper called The World put the following question to its readers, offering a prize for the best possible answer: “What’s wrong with the world?” Not the newspaper, of…

Before Their Conversions

To become Christian is, fundamentally, to perceive that it isn’t just others who have scapegoats. And note that the two greatest Christians, the founders of the Church, Peter and Paul, were two converted persecutors. Before…

Aha!

And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which had made me perceive that the work of art was  the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me. …