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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