Levavi oculos meos in montes

“I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.” The hobbits come to mind when I think of Cardinal Jean Danielou's term "church of the poor" .   I have started reading a book of his called Prayer as a Political Problem .   In it, he makes the point that the Church founded by Jesus is open to all and the only qualification is faith.   It didn't matter if you were a Pharisee or a prostitute, a tax collector or a centurion.    He writes: "The problem, therefore, is to ask what conditions make a Christian people possible.   And to answer that...

 “In the first place, the majority never read anything twice. The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. .... Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.” (p. 2)  CS Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism My previous blogging forays have been for the most part book-oriented (see here and here and here ) and this one probably will be no exception.    In reference to CS Lewis's quote above, I do a lot of "reading only once" and I think there is a value to this.   Many scholars, including CS Lewis himself,  have obviously read very widely, and draw from a variety of sources, which indicates that they know how to read in such a way that the new material is organized in their mental library and can be employed in future.   Part of this mental organization, I would say, is a mat...