Learning How To See Again, Josef Pieper
LEARNING HOW TO SEE AGAIN By Josef Pieper (translated by Lothar Krauk) from Only The Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation Man’s ability to see is in decline. Those who…
Category: christianity
“no longer did immediate this-worldly success have to be decisive”
From “God’s Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love” by Gil Bailie: The Resurrection delivers men from the fear of death,” writes John Meyendorff, “and, therefore, also from the necessity…
“The puzzle which God had flung to me consisted of elements which needed for their solution not the head only, but the heart, the imagination, the intuitions; in fact, the entire human character had to deal with it.”
From “Confessions of a Convert”, R H Benson This, then, I began to see more and more overwhelmingly: that it is possible, from the huge complications of history, philosophy,…
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…
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…
“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…
Séamus Sweeney 