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He found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way, not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time or by any rare specific or by any series of strokes, but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often, till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration, rather than a visitation, correction, or conversion. The new world which he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing, and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes, and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully deciphered and copied and re-copied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one that "contended, or cried out," or drew attention to what was going on; but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning, and a city. Roads and bridges connected it with other abbeys and cities, which had similarly grown up; and what the haughty Alaric or fierce Attila had broken to pieces, these patient meditative men had brought together and made to live again. And then, when they had in the course of many years gained their peaceful victories, perhaps some new invader came, and with fire and sword undid their slow and persevering toil in an hour. The Hun succeeded to the Goth, the Lombard to the Hun, the Tartar to the Lombard; the Saxon was reclaimed only that the Dane might take his place. Down in the dust lay the labour and civilization of centuries,—Churches, Colleges, Cloisters, Libraries,—and nothing was left to them but to begin all over again; but this they did without grudging, so promptly, cheerfully, and tranquilly, as if it were by some law of nature that the restoration came, and they were like the flowers and shrubs and fruit trees which they reared, and which, when ill-treated, do not take vengeance, or remember evil, but give forth fresh branches, leaves, or blossoms, perhaps in greater profusion, and with richer quality, for the very reason that the old were rudely broken off. If one holy place was desecrated, the monks pitched upon another, and by this time there were rich or powerful men who remembered and loved the past enough to wish to have it restored in the future.

from John Henry Newman's reflections on St. Benedict, father of Western monasticism, in Historical Sketches, Vol. II

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Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;

And hermits are contented with their cells;

And students with their pensive citadels;

Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,

Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,

High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,

Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:

In truth the prison, into which we doom

Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,

In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound

Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;

Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)

Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,

Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

—William Wordsworth

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Dame, at our door Drowned, and among our shoals, Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward: Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls! Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east, More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls, Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of Deustchland”

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To sentimentalise something is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalise something is to savour rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.

Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

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When she was a small girl, writer Annie Dillard hid pennies for others to discover—in a crack in the sidewalk or cradled in the roots of a sycamore tree. Sometimes she would draw chalk arrows on the sidewalk pointing toward the penny, and add the words SURPRISE AHEAD. “I was greatly excited , during all this arrow-drawing,” she recalls, “at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe.” A free gift from the universe. Who dares turn that down? She then goes on to say that the world around us is already filled with these free gifts—the joyous song of a bird, the glistening of rain on a leaf, the sprouting of new grass. Pennies are everywhere for the plucking. But how many people even stop to notice? How many people experience delight at a found penny? How many people know how to find the SURPRISE AHEAD. But when they lose touch with all this, it’s their loss. I can’t help thinking of music in this same way—especially now that artists don’t even receive a penny for a performance. Musicians obviously lose in this equation. But so do people, who are taught to treat songs with contempt, and sometimes never experience the awe and reverence they can inspire. They walk by the hidden penny, unseeing and unfeeling, never knowing the fortune it’s actually worth.

Ted Gioia

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The badness of [the social and political effects caused by professional elites who revolt from those to whom they are responsible] is manifested first in the loss even of the pretense of intellectual or academic community. This is a loss increasingly ominous because intellectual engagement among the disciplines, across the lines of the specializations—that is to say real conversation—would enlarge the context of work; it would press thought toward a just complexity; it would work as a system of checks and balances, introducing criticism that would reach beyond the professional standards. Without such a vigorous conversation originating in the universities and emanating from them, we get what we’ve got: sciences that spread their effects upon the world as if the world were no more than an experimental laboratory; arts and “humanities” as unmindful of their influence as if the world did not exist; institutions of learning whose chief purpose is to acquire funds and be administered by administrators; governments whose chief purpose is to provide offices to members of political parties.

The ultimate manifestation of this incoherence is loss of trust���loss, moreover, of the entire cultural pattern by which we understand what it means to give and receive trust. The general assumption now is that everybody is working in his or her own interest and will continue to do so until checked by somebody whose self-interest is more powerful. That nobody now trusts the politicians or their governments is probably the noisiest of present facts. More quietly, people are withdrawing their trust from the professions, the corporations, the education system, the religious institutions, the medical industry. Perhaps no expert has yet assigned a quantitative value to trust; it is nonetheless certain that when we have finished subtracting trust from all we think we have gained, not much will be left.

Wendell Berry, from Life Is a Miracle, quoted by Jeff Bilbro in the latest Front Porch Republic newsletter

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One of the great casualties of the modern world is the loss of discernment—the capacity to see, evaluate, and respond to reality in accordance with wisdom, order, and truth. In its place, we have a culture that oscillates between two extremes: a hyperactive judgmentalism, where everything is reactive, tribal, and immediate, and an ideology of equipoise, where judgment itself is treated as a form of violence, and all distinctions dissolve into indifference. In order to recover discernment, we must first distinguish it from judgment—not to oppose them, but to understand how they can be integrated into a true formation of wisdom. Discernment is not the rejection of judgment, but its perfection. It is the ordering of judgment into a higher, more refined vision, one that sees things not merely as they appear, but as they are in their full significance.

Ryan Mullins, “Judgment and Discernment: Recovering Classical Formation in an Age of Confusion”

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How to Write, Draw, Paint, Build—and Get Better at Anything: Have a “Growth Mindset”

Advice (from January 7, 2025) from Oregon-based fine painter Emily Pastor:

I took my first art class five years ago as a 32yo mother of three. Here’s how a growth mindset helped me go from not believing I was artistic...to a career in fine art: 1.��Talent is overrated. The skills that helped me most in the last five years are not talent-based: grit, practice, teachability, discipline, showing up on time, resilience, taking calculated risks, being willing to fail, accepting critique, studying, etc. 2. Be self-critical enough to grow without being so perfectionist it paralyzes you. You need to be willing to look at your work and know when it’s bad and know when to keep going and when to start fresh. 3. Ask for advice from respected voices and then LISTEN. I can’t tell you how many times fellow students would pay good money for workshops and proceed to ignore the instructor’s advice on purpose because changing the way they approached painting was not comfortable. 4. Speaking of being uncomfortable—growth is uncomfortable. Learning something new requires tolerating discomfort. 5. The biggest roadblock to mastering anything is your fear. Fear of failure, fear of other people’s opinions, etc. We like to find reasons to validate our fears. There will always reasons not to do something.

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The attempt to co-opt St. Joan and strip her of her womanliness has been heartbreaking to witness because it so neatly dismantles the dramatic and anthropological heart of her tale: God uses ordinary people for extraordinary graces. The Chosen One trope is the idea that only those of us who bear a secret sign or have some special suffering can really make a difference in the world. The attempt to make St. Joan an outsider-by-birth, a kind of transgender "chosen one," seems to be the worst example of this phenomenon. St. Joan does not triumph because of some inexplicable, mysterious essence within herself. If we want to see a character in the tale with an identity crisis, then we must look rather at King Charles VII. Instead, sweet Joan triumphs because she is not worried about her own identity. It is the lack of inner turmoil that makes her story so compelling. She knows precisely who--and what--she is: a Catholic, a follower of the true monarch, a woman. What these misguided interpretations of St. Joan's story overlook is the absolute consistency of her personality--and that trait makes her story inspiring. The womanly heart that longed to sit by her mother in Domremy and spin is the same heart that ordered the charge at Orleans. It was a heart that loved home, both the little village by the river and the land of France. Crucially, she loved it as a woman loves, and as Charles VII and his male advisers could not.

Jane Scharl, Letters to the Editor, from First Things (April 2024)

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If we never fail, it may be a sign that we never take the real risks art requires.

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Philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death.

G.K. Chesterton

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C.S. Lewis

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With Child

by Genevieve Taggard

Now I am slow and placid, fond of sun,  Like a sleek beast, or a worn one:  No slim and languid girl — not glad  With the windy trip I once had,  But velvet-footed, musing of my own,  Torpid, mellow, stupid as a stone. 

You cleft me with your beauty’s pulse, and now  Your pulse has taken body. Care not how  The old grace goes, how heavy I am grown,  Big with this loneliness, how you alone  Ponder our love. Touch my feet and feel  How earth tingles, teeming at my heel!  Earth’s urge, not mine,—my little death, not hers;  And the pure beauty yearns and stirs. It does not heed our ecstasies, it turns  With secrets of its own, its own concerns,  Toward a windy world of its own, toward stark  And solitary places. In the dark,  Defiant even now, it tugs and moans  To be untangled from these mother’s bones.

Read more here.

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[John Paul II's] words constantly echo in my ears: ‘Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!’ … Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? … If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us?  Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? … No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! … On the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you … Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything.

Benedict XVI

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Never give up prayer, and should you find dryness and difficulty, persevere in it for this very reason. God often desires to see what love your soul has, and love is not tried by ease and satisfaction.

  St. John of the Cross

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The soldier’s instinctive sympathy with the land is no invention of Tolkien’s. The contemporary writer John Lewis-Stempel in Where Poppies Blow has chronicled how common a sentiment it was with those fighting in the Great War, the love of nature and the wildlife-rich English field proving both a motivation to enlist as well as a comfort during the hell of the trenches. The poet Edward Thomas, when asked why he signed up, produced a handful of English soil and said “literally, for this.” The composers of the Great War era, Vaughan-Williams, Holst, and Butterworth (who died at the Somme) were all avid collectors of rural music and folk songs. England, for the men of this generation, was more than a random political unit; it was a place of cultivation, of attachment, intimately tied to the farmed earth and its settled rhythms.