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The pragmatic thinker, William James (1842–1910) is easily one of the most lucid of philosophers, with a charming and attractive writing style. It is no coincidence his brother, Henry James, is one of the finest novelists of the 20th century. William's most famous book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, is one of the great classic accounts of the subject. Another recommendation is the keen attention shown by James to questions of faith. One of the first modern psychologists, James, unlike the Freudians, recognised the importance of the religious dimension in human life.

In the English city of Norwich, if you go to the outskirts of the city, you will find the small church of St Julian. I have just finished reading a new novel by Claire called I, Julian, a beautifully written imagining of the life and times of this celebrated English mystic.

There was a time when you would not have to remind people who GK Chesterton was. The chief proponent of beer and beefsteak Catholicism, he was the greatest polemical writer of the late 19th and early 20th century.

No one can deny that the verbal vulgarity of swearing, cursing, or what used to be called profanity has become accepted and even standardised in the modern world. Whether in films, novels, music CDs, or stand-up comedians, dropping the f-word is always guaranteed to raise a laugh.

People grow less self-aware the more self-absorbed they become. An explanation for this apparent incongruity would be that genuine self-awareness entails the overcoming or transcendence of the self. The principle of self-denial, so foundational to Buddhism or asceticism more broadly, exemplifies this ancient piece of wisdom. Enlightenment demands a degree of perspective or proportion that brings with it an eclipse of the self and invites a humbling and liberating self-awareness.

Sometime before 1905, John Bagnell Bury, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, and already one of the most distinguished historians of his time, turned his attentions to St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.

In sonnet 78, by Shakespeare we catch the poet’s oblique allusion to the physical effects of the destruction wrought by the Reformation –

The late Hubert Butler once wrote a delightful essay called Influenza on Aran in which he examined the evidence for the early Irish saints. His title is explained in the first few sentences: “When I arrived in Aran by the Naomh Eanna at Kilronan I was sneezing, and by the time I had raced to St Enda’s Church at Killeany and seen the stone on which he had floated in from Connemara I was feverish and coughing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced many thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.

When I was quite young, before I had started school, I had a brief conversation with an older woman, the memory of which has remained with me ever since. She was a teacher of some sort, and the incident took place in what must have been a playschool, though as this was perhaps 60 years ago, when such things were hardly known, I cannot be sure.