“Caritas”
Love must not be, but take a body too Air and Angels —John Donne The primal metaphor has been transposed as sleep an affiance with death eludes for death defective is but sleep. Alludes to resurrection now: a dawning rosed […]
Love must not be, but take a body too Air and Angels —John Donne The primal metaphor has been transposed as sleep an affiance with death eludes for death defective is but sleep. Alludes to resurrection now: a dawning rosed […]
It always struck me as a curious expression and one my mother always used when she caught me in a moment of idle day-dreaming, a gift I own to this day: woolgathering. More so since the veterinarian in my small home town did raise sheep and did shear sheep and sent us out with bags [...]
August 1, 2021. A date of little import in world affairs. A day of savage sorrow, forlorn failure—and exhilarating liberation—for me. Few days in my life have I ever looked forward to so eagerly. None had I ever dreaded more. My eagerness was and remains unseemly and obscene. My dread, overwhelming and persistent. No more lies, no [...]
So here I am, offering you this Valentine’s Day gift, and if you scoff at the notion of celebrating the day, for “Hallmark invented it and that’s that,” consider giving these songs a listen anyway. They are delicious, uplifting, sensuous. And they won’t give you a hangover. Valentine’s Day is a funny sort of holiday. Some [...]
Richard Wagner’s grand operatic drama The Ring of the Nibelung is rightly celebrated as one of the finest accomplishments of modern art. The story that Wagner tells, with the unfolding music meant to convey a primordial sense of enchantment forever lost to us, is about the tension between love and lust; the sacred and profane; [...]
If the "Vita Nuova" had been the only major work Dante had made, this work alone would have earned him the reputation as a great poet of Western Civilization. It is well-known that Dante is one of the greatest poets in Western Civilization. His magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, is considered one of the crowning [...]
Even in God's majesty as bridegroom on the other side of death, beyond the light of the stars, the deep humility also present in Charity presents itself. If we cannot recognize the Good, we cannot recognize Love when we meet Him beyond the liminal, the threshold of death into eternity. Death is a part of [...]
When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. He conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of his honor and the common good, [...]
Having more enemies, I believe, will sharpen my mind to the reality that in this new year I will have many fights that I must fight and also many opportunities to become perfect in the way that God alone has set out—by loving my enemies. How are your New Year’s resolutions going? I rarely make [...]
The real claim of Christmas, for Christians, is that Truth and Love penetrated the cosmos. Christmas is a warm, loving, and tender season precisely for this reason. That warm fire, or bright sky, or joyful company, is made possible only because that God which ever lives and loves—to which the whole creation moves—entered the creation [...]
Eric Forsbergh writes with insight, compassion, and humor, as he describes in well-honed vignettes the human condition, anchored in our DNA: love, identity, sex, families, babies, war, and death, as we go about our multifaceted lives, making music, solving crimes, surfing the internet, and coping with aging parents as we face our own mortality. This [...]
Jesus is the only final safety we have in the world. We need to convey that truth. But we also need to convey that what He asks of those who want this safety is something that is simultaneously absolutely dangerous to us here and now, in all senses of the word. A friendly acquaintance on [...]
Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” wrestles with the death of the poet’s closest friend, a death that pushed Tennyson into a bout of depression and an immense wallowing sorrow. But the poem is also an attempt to draw near the transformative power of love—a love that turns the cold and bleak midwinter into the high noon of [...]
I knew she was dying and I tried to make the most of it. But ever since she died that same feeling is still there; that same regret, that same wish that I just need one more day, one more chance to tell her I love her, one more chance to kiss her, to thank [...]