The Dispatch
Jesus Christ’s physical healings “announced a more radical healing”
On the Readings for Sunday, February 4, 2018 […]
T.S. Eliot
The Dispatch
The Second Sunday of Advent: “In my end is my beginning”
Readings: • Is 40:1-5, 9-11 • Ps 85:9-10-11-12, 13-14 • 2 Pt 3:8-14 • Mk 1:1-8 One of the great mysteries we experience constantly and live with every second—quite literally—is the mystery of time. We […]
The Dispatch
The Prophetic Witness of St. John Paul II
Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared on CWR on April 1, 2015, and is reposted here, in slightly different form, to mark St. Pope John Paul II’s feast day, celebrated on October 22nd. ————— “We, […]
The Dispatch
“The heart has its reasons…”: On the fourth centenary of Pascal’s birth
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of […]
The Dispatch
Dana Gioia’s Memento Mori
In beginning and ending in the underworld, Dana Gioia’s new book of poetry Meet Me At The Lighthouse gives his latest poems an arresting perspective from which he can essay subjects of profound import, including […]
Books
T.S. Eliot and Uncritical Biography
I The other day, I was reading Eugenio Montale’s introduction to Allen Mandlebaum’s translation of The Divine Comedy and I was struck by the wisdom of something the modern Italian poet said, and it was […]
The Dispatch
On Epiphany and going on pilgrimage in the same place
As the first Christian pilgrimage, the Epiphany sounds the call to renew the pilgrim heart in all Catholics. And for many, that will mean preparing for the epiphanies—the apocalypses, the revelations—that can come suddenly to […]
Essay
The Hole in Your Culture
In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), T. S. Eliot writes that “all parties live in amity, so long as they accept some common moral conventions.” While that may seem rather general and somewhat overstated, it is […]
Books
Divine Ironies
From its very outset Christianity was . . . a feeling which merely disgusted, hid and decked itself out in its belief in a ‘another’ or ‘better’ life . . . a Beyond, invented in […]
Essay
“And let my cry come unto Thee”: On Ash Wednesday
Salutem in Domino (Health and salvation in the Lord)! That traditional Latin greeting encapsulates our hope and prayer every day of our lives, but one that we raise with particular intensity for the next forty […]