Pentecost: The Dove Descending Breaks the Air
From Little Gidding, TS Eliot: The dove descending breaks the air With flames of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only…
Month: May 2018
In July my father went to take the waters
In July my father went to take the waters and left me, with my mother and elder brother, a prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days. Just…
Denise Levertov, “Conversion of Brother Lawrence”
I particularly love the lines “your way was not to exalt nor avoid the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant” – which neatly summarises Brother Lawrence’s way of deceptive…
“A closed mind and know-it-allness are fundamentally forms of resistance to the truth of real things” – Josef Pieper on prudence
From “The Four Cardinal Virtues“: No man is altogether self-sufficient in matters of prudence’; without docilitas there is no perfect prudence. Docilitas, however, is of course not the ‘docility’ and…
Why hasn’t an earthquake toppled the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
I’m sure you’ve asked yourself the same question… well, here is the answer…. Basically, it’s all down to the soil: After studying available seismological, geotechnical and structural information, the research…
“The Best Lack All Conviction, while the Worst / Are Full Of Passionate Intensity”
According to this article from August 2016, lines from Yeats’ The Second Coming were quoted more often in the first seven months of 2016 than in any of the prior…
Crusader tomb, St Patrick’s Church, Marlfield, Clonmel
The medieval grave-slab to the church interior and that in the graveyard wall, the latter thought locally to be from a crusader’s grave, adds archaeological and historical interest to the…
“salvation would be easier for the clever and leisured than for the dull and busy”
From “Confessions of a Convert”. R H Benson: It had been put to me by my Superior that I was surely incurring the guilt of pride in venturing to set…
Séamus Sweeney 