Connected by Touch

Fairy tales are the fashionable thing in Hollywood and on TV. Every studio seems to be reinventing the classic tales – mostly with dire results. The successful new Tim Kring TV series Touch is much more original. Like the delightful film August Rush (which is based on the idea that people are mystically connected through music), Touch tells us that the world is built on numbers. The credit sequence alone is a work of art, showing a kaleidoscope...

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Beauty in Trust

The National Trust in Britain is worthy of much praise and thanks for the wonderful work it does preserving and caretaking some of our most beautiful and historically significant buildings, gardens, and landscapes for public use and enjoyment.  Most recently, it successfully fought the Government's ill-considered development plans, which would have threatened our heritage for very little actual gain. The new development guidelines have been...

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A Certain Faith

A masterpiece of modern apologetics, this book builds upon the fact that there is an intrinsic, formative principle within thought — namely, being. Those unfamiliar with the idea of analogy of being will be amazed by the concept’s depth and compass. After securing it within natural theology, Dr Pearlman goes on to thread the analogy of being through cosmology, Christology, the nature of the Church, and the moral and spiritual life. The book is designed...

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Music of the Spheres

A useful article on music as '"metaphysics in sound" by Robert R. Reilly is posted among the useful articles in the left-hand column and can also be read here. A good YouTube video on the same subject is here. Meanwhile Quentin de la Bedoyere's Secondsight blog has an interesting thread on the mysteries of mathematics here. And Colin Gormley has an excellent article on Catholic education he...

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Our Summer School - 7th to 21st August

Why not join us and students of Thomas More College this summer in a two-week course, based in Oxford and the West country, on the question of Catholic identity and the vocation of the Catholic writer? We also touch on the deeper question of what it means to be human, how a vision of humanity was imperilled by the English Reformation which helped to create the modern world, and how the Literary Revival (from Newman to Tolkien) tried to recover and...

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More on the elements

But what are the four (or five) elements that Eliot was so interested in (see previous post)? The idea that the world is composed of just a handful of basic elements is common to all the great civilizations, and in the Egyptian, Greek and Indian traditions these elements are given the names Earth, Air, Fire, and Water – with the addition of a fifth "subtle" element or "quintessence" sometimes called Aether, the first element in creation. This latter...

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Elements in Eliot

An important book by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr, Aethereal Rumours: T.S. Eliot's Physics and Poetics, does for The Waste Land and the Four Quartets something of what Michael Ward does for the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis in Planet Narnia. In his book, Michael Ward shows that each of the seven tales of Narnia was intended by Lewis to correspond with one of the seven astrological planets – taking these as spiritual symbols of perennial value...

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Catholic English teacher

Allow me to draw your attention anyway to The Catholic English Teacher by Roy Peachey, as well as this article by him on great Catholic writers outside the Western can...

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Ruralist art

An important part of education is learning to look at the world around us, and artists teach us to do this. I have posted several times on landscape artists in particular. Whether it is the Group of Seven venturing out into the Canadian wilderness, or the Impressionists following in Turner's footsteps as they try to capture the flickering moods of light and atmosphere (perhaps even travelling "inside light" the way Tolkien travelled "inside language"),...

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The sixth planet

One way into astronomy for a lot of people, I suspect, is the beauty of the planet Saturn, second largest planet in our system (95 times the mass of the Earth). NASA's Cassini space probe, still orbiting the planet, has sent back a multitude of extraordinary photos that show us this gem of the solar system in close up. Other planets have rings, but these are simply spectacular, and visible from Earth through even a small telescope. Made largely of...

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Marshall McLuhan

Best known these days for his phrases "The medium is the message" (the title of one of his books was The Medium is the Massage), and "the global village", not to mention a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall, Marshall McLuhan was a prophet of the new communications technology and the founder of Media Studies with his book Understanding Media (1964). Last year was the 100th anniversary of his birth, and he died in 1980. But there...

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Forming Priests, Poets, Philosophers

The Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, has announced a rather impressive programme of formation for Priests, Poets and Philosophers, described as "an academic and Renaissance convivio where the perennial wisdom of the Catholic intellectual tradition challenges and entices the mind and soul." It includes a roundtable and a course, with lectures and discussions across a wide range of disciplines. The whole is partly designed for priests and seminarians, but teachers and parishioners and other students are also welcome. Visit the website...

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Through the Eyes of Faith

The purpose of my book Beauty for Truth's Sake was partly to help overcome the division between faith and reason, and the fragmentation of academic disciplines in the absence of a coherent vision of the world. This is also the purpose of a series from HarperCollins called "Through the Eyes of Faith", textbooks for Christian colleges that examine each of the disciplines in turn from a faith perspective. It is a bold move – has anyone out there reviewed...

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Self-creation

Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal and former President of the Royal Society writes in an article about manned spaceflight in the Daily Telegraph (10 January):"Even though manned spaceflight will be a diminishing priority for governments, I believe and hope that some people now living will walk on Mars (though they may well go with one-way tickets). Moreover, a century or two from now, intrepid adventurers may be living independently from the Earth....

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Pope on education

The Pope's Message for the World Day of Peace (1 Jan.) this year is titled "Educating Young People in Justice and Peace", and section 3 in particular contains some luminous passages summarizing the Pope's fundamental message to the modern world. For example:"Man is a being who bears within his heart a thirst for the infinite, a thirst for truth – a truth which is not partial but capable of explaining life’s meaning – since he was created in the image and likeness of God. The grateful recognition that life is an inestimable gift, then, leads to...

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