From galaxies to continental borders; from heartbeats to growing forests; from ice crystals to pinecones, fractal patterns are deeply embedded in the Creation.
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Letter-writing is a dance that accommodates two paces that may be quite different, yet generates a rhythm of its own. Correspondence, if you can bear it, is a delightful and demanding game, played over time and space between persons who recognize that they cohere somewhere beyond time and space – a game for supernatural giants,
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“The Holy Family’s Return to Nazareth” is a bronze sculpture depicting an imagined scene of the Holy Family traveling back to Nazareth after finding Jesus in the temple.
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Kate Morales-Marin was featured in the January-February issue of St. Austin Review!
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This story’s complex themes are resolved with an honesty and transcendent beauty that is profoundly satisfying. I recommend this book very highly, especially for family read-alouds.
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Cal Newport, in Deep Work cites A. G. Sertillanges, which is enough to recommend his book to me! Among Newport’s insights, are his observation that boredom is quite valuable for concentration training, that multitasking frays your capacity for forward attention,
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The monster’s failure to be perfectly humanized by his amazing self-education, time spent in nature, and appreciation of beauty and human goodness may be the most human thing about him. If ever a ‘Noble Savage’ (the Romantic conception of a purely natural man) was shown to have an irreparable wound, and a bent toward evil despite his initial ‘innocence,’ and his humanistic education, it is this creature.
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A few more things that caught my interest, caused me to wonder, and led me to praise God.
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Geometry is about connection to the physical world! It is about constructing lines, triangles, equal angles, polygons and all that! How will a student wonder at the amazing development of man’s mind in correspondence to the actuality of form in the created world if Geometry is presented as an abstract, mental construct?
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When I see a library copy bristling with my remember-this tabs before I’ve reached even the half-way point, I know this is one I’ll have to keep and quote, buy and share! Matthew B. Crawford has outdone himself with this second volley against the destructive philosophies of personhood so prevalent today.
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The word ‘interest’ is a reminder that you have the intellectual faculty of placing your mind ‘into the essence’ of things. Your capacity to wonder, to be caught, to interest yourself in reality is an aspect of the child-likeness you’ll need to get to Heaven. Here are a few things my interest has caught:
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To see the significance of names embodied in Jayber Crow helps us enter into the mystery that “the name one receives is a name for eternity. In the kingdom, the mysterious and unique character of each person marked with God’s name will shine forth in splendor” (CCC 2159).
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The ‘danger’ of life in a learning community is that your reading list is ever expanding further than your expected lifetime! That’s also the delight, so here are some of our trustee, faculty, and friends’ reading lists for the coming year to add to your own.
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Wiker does a great job of placing polarized, knee-jerk, talking point positions in the same space - refusing to be drawn into the poles. As a Catholic should, he looks for the via media - not a compromise, but a higher place where the tension between irreconcilables is resolved. His book is challenging, because it invites us to do the same as we develop our thoughts about the place of the human being in the natural order.
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Did you know Chesterton was trained as an artist? Many people know other facets of his thought, or enjoy his fiction without delving into what he thought about art-making, being a creator, or the role of the artist in the Church and society.: the whiteness of chalk, the value of doing things badly, the importance of framing, whether poetry should rhyme, learning to bear the tension of paradox, etc….
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G.K. Chesterton’s poem Gloria in Profundis strikes a different note in harmony with the Gloria in Excelsis Deo that the Incarnation rightly elicits. Together, they remind us to look through all things for glimpses of the glory of God.
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Might it be that some dark trends in popular culture are the manifestations of the inherent human need to grapple with the Four Last Things? Where the Church squarely faces up to the realities of death, judgment, heaven and hell, post-modern man faces a vacuum of unbelief in the very realities that most demand his attention. The rational, materialist mind – reduced as it is in power to bear the tension this produces – has one escape route left to him.
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