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Let’s say you’ve just comeFrom confession. Late sunPours through the budding treesThat mark the brown creek washing Itself beyond the field. Two men who had been mowingThe first greening grassHave stopped...

Stands of bearded iris, purple in mourningSpring up, early, among their cool green speartips,Pale and pointed, palmlike, though no one’s picked them,Criss-crossed the fronds, blessed, behind a crucifix.Still two...

It is one thing to talk about the Resurrection. It is quite another to see the Easter fire struck in the night, the candle lit, the light of Christ...

Real artists don’t copy.” Tomie dePaola, the children’s author and illustrator who died last week at age eighty-five, once recalled this counsel given him as a child of four...

He tells himself a tale his grandmother told:Babuschka sleeps by the fire. Outside new snowLaps the window. Camels look in from the cold.Wise-crowned kings—they know her name—say, GoWith us,...

In Advent, the hermit lights a candle-end,Drips wax onto a saucer, stands it there.The early nightfall forms itself aroundThis little shivering flame. He says his prayer:Stir up Thy power,...

These stories are all about unsupervised children,” my oldest daughter observed years ago, when we were reading Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books aloud, one after another, books in...

My morning reading has settled into some habitual grooves, and for a reliably thoughtful one or two articles a day, I go to FT’s ” On the Square ,” to...

Fr. James Martin notes  Newman’s unusual feast day, the anniversary not of Newman’s “entrance into Heaven,” but of his entrance into, as Newman himself put it, “the Church of...

View the Westminster Hall Speech via the Telegraph ’s live blog. From the same blog, a last glimpse of the Pope as night falls on Britain: “Eagle-eyed Pope fans...

Early this morning, London’s Metropolitan Police arrested five men in connection with a possible terror plot aimed at Pope Benedict XVI. The arrests were made at 0545 BST at...

There are some who now seek to exclude religious belief from public discourse, to privatize it or even to paint it as a threat to equality and liberty. Yet...

In defiance of a ruling by the British Advertising Standards Authority—doesn’t that ring quaintly on the ear: Advertising Standards Authority —an ice cream company has announced its intent to...

Everywhere she goes, he goes. She’s brought him here for Sunday tea. He’s been with me two weeks , she says and deftly shifts him on her knee. The...