As a creature of habit, I do not like surprises. I like the routine and the predictability. I like knowing when my train arrives, when a task can be feasibly completed, when I can expect to return home to make dinner, and so on. Big changes are scary and often dealt with by padding new routines around them, like a calendar’s version of a burrito. Very often, however, the routine can get to me. I become irritated by the predictability... Read more
Dr Anne Carpenter, an assistant professor of Theology at St. Mary’s College and a fellow Patheos Catholic blogger (follow her work on The Rule and the Raven), put up a post the other day that drew attention to a beautiful quote by St. Irenaeus of Lyon that I, to my shame, had not come across before. Drawing on the image of God as the potter and us as the clay, Irenaeus returns to the topic of our status as creature, but... Read more
A couple of years ago, I wrote about a link between the electronic dance music genre and themes of transcendance. I wrote then that of all music genres I frequently listen to, “it is the most upfront in bringing in the vocabulary of soul, redemption, transcendence, eternity, light and darkness familiar to many believers, including many Christians”. What comes out in particular is the secular version of an eschatological horizon, which is played out in one of my favourite tracks in this... Read more
In his A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, Josef Pieper wrote on the virtue of silence in this way: Since reason is nothing else than the power to understand reality, then all reasonable, sensible, sound, clear and heart-stirring talk stems from listening silence. Thus all discourse requires a foundation in the motherly depth of silence. Otherwise speech is sourceless: it turns into chatter, noise and deception…Talk…sets its roots downward into the nourishing soil of silence. Pieper contrasts... Read more
We are now entering the Triduum, to celebrate the passion of Jesus Christ. …celebrate… How is it possible to celebrate the events leading up to his death on Golgotha, one of, if not the, most brutal tragedy in the history of man? For those of us who have had tough Lents, for whom certain realisations of their character or some phase of suffering have left them feeling very raw – for those of us in the Body of Christ that... Read more
A colleague’s wife noticed that I had on my shelf A Distant Prospect, a novel set in 1920s Sydney, written by my friend Annette Young. To my shame, it was one of a long line of books that I had bought, put on the shelf and had intended to read before sidelining it for reading more related to work. After a few years of delay, I finally picked it up and cracked it open. The novel looks at the life of... Read more
I have been kindly invited by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America to write a feature contribution to an upcoming edition of Humanum Review. Humanum Review looks at an issue each year, around which book reviews and articles orbit. When I first came across the journal a few years ago, I read an excellent article reviewing the literature on the children of divorce. Their current issue looks at the topic... Read more
Readers might remember that, last year, I was invited to make a lenten video contribution in collaboration with Common Grace, an organisation that describes itself as a “movement of Christians passionate about Jesus and justice”. This year, Common Grace’s theme for the Lenten season focused on the Beatitudes as laid out in the Gospel of Matthew. I was invited to make a contribution to the passage “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Mt 5:5). At the time... Read more
We live with regret all the time. It is an amoebic experience that reaches out to touch every corner of life. Many regrets – like that packet of snacks you buy on a whim, only to come home and find a dozen other packets of the same thing in your larder – concern the things banal and are easily forgotten. Others, however, can touch the core of who we are as persons – the job you left for another that... Read more
Lent is a time of penance, a time where self-aggrandisement has no place and where repentance should take centre stage. Because of that, I will not engage in any form of self promotion during this holy season. Instead, I will shamelessly promote myself before it all starts, and humbly suggest for your lenten reading Redeeming Flesh: the Way of the Cross with Zombie Jesus. Readers would probably be aware that I gave a Holy Week retreat to the seminarians of the Holy Spirit... Read more
The Divine Wedgie
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