These reflections, gentle but piercing in their spiritual psychology, were originally given as an Easter retreat for the Community of the Holy Cross, an Anglican Benedictine convent, in 2018. With typical deftness, Rowan Williams both channels the insights of the Desert Fathers and quietly . . . . Continue Reading »
Robert Cwiklik joins the podcast to discuss his book Sheridan’s Secret Mission: How the South Won the War After the Civil War. Continue Reading »
On a spring day seven years ago I was driving across Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn feeling unusually right with the world. I felt peaceful and uplifted because I had, a few days before, settled in my mind a difficult, painful question: I would eventually leave my husband. We had children . . . . Continue Reading »
The nineteenth century, for all but the most literal-minded, begins with the French Revolution and ends with the First World War. Or in the words of one influential overview of nineteenth-century Germany: “In the beginning was Napoleon.” At the end were trenches, tanks mired in mud, mustard gas, . . . . Continue Reading »
Bert Ghezzi joins the podcast to discuss his new book The Sign of the Cross. Continue Reading »
Most Christians misunderstand the relationship of poetry to their faith. They consider it an admirable but minor aspect of religious practice—elegant verbal decoration in honor of the divine. They recognize poetry’s place in worship. Congregations need hymns, and the Psalms should be . . . . Continue Reading »
During and after the Black Death, Christianity saw the blossoming of an interior spirituality. Continue Reading »
Obituaries for Toni Morrison, who died on August 5, remember her as a Nobel Prize–winning novelist, a black woman novelist, and the last great American novelist—never a Catholic novelist. Morrison converted to Catholicism at age twelve but stood aloof from the Church for years. Despite a few . . . . Continue Reading »
Heresies perish not with their authors, but like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up again in another . - Thomas Brown, Religio Medici Modernism is the synthesis of all heresies . - Pope Pius VI When I was young, time took forever to pass. I remember that . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1975, Fritjof Capra, an Austrian émigré physicist and systems theorist, published The Tao of Physics, an effort to find parallels between scientific principles and the insights of Eastern spirituality. He later became a guru in his own right, specializing in ecology, in Berkeley, . . . . Continue Reading »
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