In the beginning, there was not coldness and darkness: There was the fire,” wrote the Jesuit anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin in “The Mass on the World.”
Articles from January 2023
Teilhard de Chardin • Archives des jésuites de France (CC BY-SA 3.0)
"A Day Dream" by Edward John Poynter (1863)
Saving souls, saving lives
I have been reading Judith Flanders’s biography of the Macdonald sisters, four Victorian women best known for having married or mothered famous Victorian men.
Photo by alan braeley on Unsplash
Free as a bird
All afternoon I have been watching a pair of hummingbirds play about our porch. They live somewhere nearby, though I haven’t found their nest. They are attracted to our hummingbird feeder, which we keep full of sugar water.
Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash
The future of Catholicism?
So now we wait for a new Supreme Pontiff. John Paul II will be hard to top.
Photo by bady abbas on Unsplash
On the virtue of gray
There is no bright side to the story of Terri Schiavo, nor would it have been my place to suggest to her loved ones an appropriate course of action.
Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash
In praise of the Enlightenment
In an essay “Why Religion,” the poet Czesław Miłosz tells us that he lived at a time when human imagination was dramatically changing. Heaven and Hell disappeared, he says, belief in an afterlife was weakened, and the borderline between humans and animals was blurred by the theory of evolution.
"The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel" by Ditlev Blunck (1830)
Ezekiel’s vision
As I ease into retirement, I have taken to spending part of each year on a quiet little island in the Caribbean. I came here looking for winter warmth, of course, but also for dark skies. I am a stargazer by lifelong habit, and my primary home near a major American city is awash in artificial light.
The Orion nebula • NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Public Domain)
A peephole to the gods?
Under truly dark skies our ancestors saw the middle “star” of Orion’s sword as a tiny smudge of light. The Englishman William Derham, who wrote on cosmology in the early 18th century, believed the glow in Orion was a opening in the celestial sphere through which we observe the radiance of God.
Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash
On death and beauty
Few poems of the previous century have attracted more discussion than Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning.”
Detail of the sculpture "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss" by Canova • Photo by Jean-Pol Grandmont (CC BY 4.0)
The door of the soul
Mouths. I want to write about mouths. These lips I caress with my fingertip. These teeth I bare. This tongue, curled and soft like a bear in its den. This throat, strung with the instruments of speech.