Collected here are articles and reviews that have appeared in print, as well as a presentation of my books. There are a few interviews and some sound material, notably my reading of the Gospels in Greek, a project that remains work in progress.
‘Your heart’, says the Lord, ‘is where your treasure is.’ It can be mortifying to discover that our treasure, and so our heart, is no longer where we thought it was.
Continue reading It happens often enough that people who generally do not cling to material things or comforts, people who do not much mind, are furiously tied to their books.
Continue reading It is not the Apostles, it turns out, who are sozzled; it is the world, wearily drunk on its self-sufficiency, pragmatic pleasure-seeking, thrills, and aimless meandering.
Continue reading Once again, Jamie and I gather to address questions raised by people who follow the series, questions that impress us by their insight and sincerity.
Continue reading Most of us conduct our daily lives within predictable parameters where familiar boundaries steer our behaviour and choices. But what happens when we find ourselves in unfamiliar, unbounded places - is our virtue then reliable and firm?
Continue reading God’s concern is not to keep us comfortably undisturbed. His concern is that we should know the truth, which alone sets us free.
Continue reading At once dispassionately lucid and shrewd, the Fathers teach us to discern. That is why they could give counsels both sublime and practical.
Continue reading Eric Schüldt, who makes wonderful programmes on Swedish radio, has always been convinced of the existential stakes of literature, unconvinced by those who would draw too sharp distinctions between literature and 'reality'.
Continue reading There’s a sense of honesty about Augustine – a sane realism - regarding the human condition, in its sublime and its deplorable aspects. He understood the importance of friends, of not being self-sufficient; he took the science of theology extremely seriously; he had a capacity for joy.
Continue reading Lust confers not vision but blindness. It locks me in myself, making me live in the world as if I were its sole significant subject, subsisting on arousal.
Continue reading Great self-control is needed to accept with tact an offering that repels me, and to do it so whole-heartedly that the giver is thrilled.
Continue reading There are bad, angry words we should keep from speaking, fighting against them with all our might. There are other words, however, that call out to be spoken - if we keep them shut up in our heart they will poison us.
Continue reading ‘I have always liked the phrase “nursing a grudge”’, says the Reverend John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, ‘because many people are tender of their resentments, as of the thing nearest to their hearts.’ To let resentments go is costly.
Continue reading In the Church we easily spend our time proposing sublime answers, well thought out and elegantly phrased, to questions no one is asking.
Continue reading There is a stage at which speech is still potential - a thought has been articulated, the words lie ready on our tongue, but as yet they exist only in our mind. At that moment we exercise sovereign freedom to choose whether to speak or whether to keep silent.
Continue reading If the fear of God is not anxiety but 'an existential consciousness of reverence', how do you explain this to someone who has only ever understood fear in terms of punishment or dread?
Continue reading The pope has a wonderful and joyful mission, to proclaim Christ to the world! But the head we await will be crowned with thorns in a variety of ways.
Continue reading The Christian proposition is founded on the claim that an Eternal Word, the metaphysical and intentional source of all there is, engages with the world and speaks to it for its flourishing’s sake; and that this Word, at a given point in time, entered history to renew human nature from within, repairing malfunction, so to speak, by re-installing the operating system.
Continue reading Things do not always get sorted out; illness is not always healed; sometimes fractured relationships cannot be mended. To trust God is not to assume that I will be alright - it is to know that, whatever happens, sense may emerge from senselessness, redemptive purity from destructive contamination.
Continue reading Pope Francis spent his life proclaiming the historical, ethical, and metaphysical impact of the resurrection. He taught us to see, and interpret, life's circumstances in the light of Christ's victory over death - this we will faithfully do.
Continue reading Letting ourselves be taken by the hand by the Church, our Mother, we shall appreciate the Marian dimension of our faith, not just as 'devotion', but as the atmosphere within which we live and move and have our being, where, with Mary, Christ's Mother and ours, we learn to own and express our deepest grief and our most exultant joy, carried by a well-founded hope that is at once intelligent and visceral.
Continue reading If I set out to correct, or worse, to condemn, another on the basis of bitterness, anger, or revulsion, my words, however tinged with glacial piety, will bring no blessing; no, they are likely to do harm, perhaps even to induce despair, causing little ones to sin while readying my own stiff neck, the support of my conceited head, for the millstone.
Continue reading We may have known times when an action or a word of ours has ruined something precious; when that which, a moment ago, was integral and dear lies at our feet in pieces, mud-splattered - at such times the voice of God resounds in our inner ear, ‘Adam, where are you?’ And we have no answer.
Continue reading Despair tends to issue from ambivalence, situations in which we feel overwhelmed by confused pain, unable to enact a response. What we can articulate, we can learn to deal with.
Continue reading My little peanut heart starts growing as it becomes more and more able to assume into itself the reality of other lives. It starts growing, step by little step, towards the dimensions of God's heart, which is a heart without any limitations at all.
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