Levavi oculos meos in montes

 I suppose I kept the reading in Lent post noncommital enough so that I don't have to reframe my resolutions.   I said I was going to revisit some of my old sources, especially St Francis de Sales, and I am doing that, though slowly.        Then I mentioned that I was going to read A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, and After Aquinas by Fergus Kerr .   And I am/will be doing that too, but currently those books are both in hiatus. Instead, I took up Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians by Fergus Kerr, which is easier to read than After Aquinas.   Its focus is the theologians whose lives spanned the 20th century, more or less.   All of the ones discussed were somewhat controversial before Vatican II Council, and afterwards, they can be divided into basically two categories:   the ones whose work was more or less recognized and affirmed in the Council documents, and those who continued on a trajectory that eventual...

“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” Tolkien's Philosophy of Stories A couple of weeks ago, I sprained my foot badly  -- somehow I managed to make sitting in my study chair into a dangerous athletic endeavour, and tore at least a couple of ligaments while trying to stand up.    Also, our elderly car went back to the repair shop.    This has changed my Lent in several ways.  One of them is that I am sitting down a lot more than I had planned, especially considering that spring seems to have arrived here and there is a vegetable garden to plant.   And Lenten practices have to be the kind you can do wearing an air cast, meaning mostly sedentary. While sitting around, I started reading a large book, A Secular Age by Charles Taylor .   I got sidetracked, though, after I found an article by Fergus Kerr called Christians in a Secular Age .    This led me to his page on Academia , and then to his list of books.  ...

  Ash Wednesday  , where we reflect "thou art dust, and to dust thou must return" seems like a good day to think about Cardinal Newman's analogy of corruption :   To find then what a corruption or perversion of the truth is, let us inquire what the word means, when used literally of material substances. Now it is plain, first of all, that a corruption is a word attaching to organized matters only; a stone may be crushed to powder, but it cannot be corrupted. Corruption, on the contrary, is the breaking up of life, preparatory to its termination. This resolution of a body into its component parts is the stage before its dissolution; it begins when life has reached its perfection, and it is the sequel, or rather the continuation, of that process towards perfection, being at the same time the reversal and undoing of what went before. Till this point of regression is reached, the body has a function of its own, and a direction and aim in its action, and a nature with law...

A list, by no means comprehensive, of some Catholic authors who have had a large influence on my life in the 35 years since my conversion ( besides of course the Evangelists and Biblical authors): Augustine Benedict Thomas Aquinas Ignatius of Loyola St Francis de Sales In more modern times: Therese of Lisieux John Henry Newman GK Chesterton Josef Ratzinger/ Benedict XVI Ever since  Advent, I've been revisiting the works particularly of the pre-modern saints on this list, and even more particularly, the ones that specifically have designed methods or rules of life.  That would be:   St Benedict with his Rule for Monks; St Ignatius with his Spiritual Exercises; and St Francis de Sales with his "Introduction to the Devout Life".      During Lent I'm going to continue revisiting these works particularly.   I'm not commiting to reading through them (though as an oblate I read through the Rule 3 times a year, in daily installments -- it is not long...