Search Results for 'Through a Glass Darkly'

Suffering is not a zero sum game between Israel and Gaza, but facts matter, if only to redress the balance.

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.

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.

I have always been fascinated by maps, especially old maps. One of the most famous is the Tube map - better known as the London Underground map - a schematic transport map of the lines, stations and services of the London Underground, known colloquially as "the Tube", hence the map's name.

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.

In late November 1623, John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, fell ill, probably of typhus, or ‘spotted fever’, as it was called in his day. He was in his early 50s, a widower since the death of his beloved wife Anne in 1617, and the father of four daughters and a son, who carried his father’s name.

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.

Two distinct phases of the hermetic life existed in early Christianity. The first phase was the Egyptian phase, the era of the desert hermits. With its scarcity of resources and its forbidding geography, the desert was a radical contrast to urban areas. These factors shaped the fierce insights of the desert hermits: the extreme individualism, their hostility toward social life, and their separation from conventional ecclesiastical authority.