Owen Barfield was sometimes called “the silent Inkling”. C.S.Lewis called him “the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.” Both having survived the Great War, Barfield and Lewis became friends at Oxford, and their friendship continued the rest of their lives. After Oxford, through the 1920s, Barfield tried to make his way as a writer producing [...]
Today is the feast day of the Apostle St James, and it's worth remembering this piece from the archives which undermines the modernist Biblical scholars' attempts to put the dating of the New Testament as late as possible. Bible scholars piece together details of evidence to build up a full picture of the New Testament authorship and [...]
The other day on Twitter I posted a picture from St Peter's in Rome and someone commented that he had visited his local Catholic church only to find a bare brick auditorium badly in need of repair and poorly decorated. I get it. The fullness of the Catholic faith in our atheistic age is a buried [...]
Here is my somewhat annual Fourth of July post. Every year I review it and add a few things and remove a few depending on my mood and the circumstances... In no particular order here is the list of stuff I love about America. Hot Dogs and Sauerkraut, Drive In Restaurants, The Blue Ridge Parkway, Five [...]
When I was a priest in the Church of England I served as the Vicar of Brading on the Isle of Wight. A favorite part of the island was St Boniface Down--a lovely hillside overlooking the sea where breezy hikes and picnic spots were abundant. It stood above St Boniface parish--where a suitable Neo-gothic church was [...]
Heresies are like weeds. They keep coming back. The thing is, they come back in different guises. In the fourth century Arianism was part of the great debate over the divinity of Christ and therefore the definition of the Holy Trinity. Arianism developed into not just a theological problem, but a major schism. The Arians had [...]
In the wake of the controversial enthronement of Sarah Mullally as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, conservative Catholics on social media bubbled over with indignation. When Pope Leo sent a letter of congratulations the grumblings and rumblings grew louder. The pope was "affirming heresy"! The pope was condoning women's ordination! He should have corrected her, [...]
‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ Tolkien admitted that he wrote these words absentmindedly on the back of an exam paper he was marking. Such spontaneous inspiration suggests the work of the subconscious mind, and if the subconscious mind, then a more mysterious source of inspiration may well be at work. [...]
Julian of Norwich was an anchoress in the fourteenth century in the city of Norwich in England. An anchoress is a female hermit. Julian's anchorage was a small room around 15'X 30' attached to the church of St Julian in Norwich (and she took her name from the church where she was immured) Her cell did [...]
The last of the seven deadly sins is pride--or perhaps I should say the FIRST of the deadly sins is pride because pride is at the root of all the others. We often misdiagnose bragging and arrogance and vanity as pride. Bragging, arrogance and vanity are symptoms of pride, but pride is much deeper. In my [...]