When Pompeii was destroyed, the meaning of Pompeii remained. John M. Frame. “The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God”. 1987. pgs 34-35. Footnote. A few weeks ago, I posted a letter to my daughter who will be born next week, so I have the act of naming a person in my head as I read […]

I was arguing with a Franciscan nun about the Resurrection. I said, “Clearly this is horseshit. Surely, you don’t believe this stuff.” She said, “It’s easier for you to believe that the meek will inherit the earth?” Mary Karr. Lunch Poems. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_VWjKShI-0

To My Daughter at the Approach of Her Birth

Sunday, October 6, 2013 Dear Mayah Louise Wieck, Your mother and brothers and I will call your name daily and more commonly than we take bread. And we’ll pronounce it with every inflection of emotion one can imagine, and some that we can’t yet because we haven’t met you and those emotions haven’t even begun to resonate […]

Ruins of Rome

Du Bellay in Rome  PDF view You who arrive to look for Rome in RomeAnd can in Rome no Rome you know discover:These palaces and arches ivied overAnd ancient walls are Rome, now Rome’s a name. Here see Rome’s overbearing overcome—Rome, who brought the world beneath her powerAnd held sway, robbed of sway: see and […]

belcimer: Toward the end it was difficult for him to work, and as the illness became protracted and the days were long, as it were, with complications, his spirits were often low. Perhaps the strong and daring, he said, don’t need him, but for me, as for David, who in the Gospel is always singing, […]

Rowan Williams, “Advent Calendar”

wesleyhill: He will come like last leaf’s fall.One night when the November windhas flayed the trees to bone, and earthwakes choking on the mould,the soft shroud’s folding. He will come like frost.One morning when the shrinking earthopens on mist, to find itselfarrested in the netof alien, sword-set beauty. He will come like dark.One evening when […]

The loss of the aesthetic sensibility in the Church has weakened its ability to make its call heard in the world. Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi, have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas. The Catholic Writer Today Encouraging Catholic writers to renovate […]

Art does not need to be religious. There are great masterpieces that have no hint of religious transcendence. What I am suggesting is something more subtle and complex. Culture is a conversation. A vigorous culture contains different voices, often in active debate. The voice of religious faith enlarges and enlivens the overall dialectic of culture, […]

The road to Damascus may offer a pilgrim sudden and miraculous intervention, but faith provides no shortcuts on the road to Parnassus. The Catholic Writer Today Encouraging Catholic writers to renovate and reoccupy their own tradition. Dana Gioia

Writing with no past has no future…

The great and present danger to American literature is the growing homogeneity of our writers, especially the younger generation. Often raised in several places in no specific cultural or religious community, educated with no deep connection to a particular region, history, or tradition, and now employed mostly in academia, the American writer is becoming as […]