How is it that cheese could contain an entire world? Splaying Old English white cheddar on a sandwich at lunchtime is, for me, a routine and ritual that is charged with an entire way of life. The cheese is enchanted, charmed with a sense of place. Like Proust’s madeleines, its scent and texture is a…
The Guardian has posted a wonderfully poignant little film that features Madeleine Bunting, (author of The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre), along with her son, as they visit her father’s plot of land in Yorkshire–on which he built a marvelous chapel filled with his sculptures. (Unfortunately it can’t be embedded here, but do…
While the writing is far from lyrical, and while the book feels a bit “padded,” John Freeman’s The Tyranny of Email deserves attention and discussion. In a way, it’s going to tell you something you already know; on the other hand, it synthesizes this common knowledge into a compelling and convicting account of how bad…
Visiting prisoners has historically been central to the church’s works of mercy (Matt. 25:36). Philippe Claudel’s film, Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (I’ve Loved You So Long), pictures the challenge of a more rigorous call to compassion: welcoming the prisoner back home. The story centers around Juliette, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, who…
Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech is concerned with how parrhesia (free speech) became “problematized” in Greek democracy. But it doesn’t take much imagination to start drawing analogies. Consider just this snippet: “The problem, very roughly put, was the following. Democracy is founded by a politeia, a constitution, where the demos, the people, exercise power, and where…
Yesterday I was working through Graham Ward’s (unfortunately neglected) book, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice and there discovered a snippet from Charles Peguy‘s poem, “The Portal of the Mystery of Hope” (1912). It was like I’d been waiting my whole life to read these lines: From The Portal of the Mystery of Hope By Charles…