by Marilyn McEntyre
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by Victoria Emily Jones
In early modern Europe most of what passed for social welfare was organized and run by confraternities, or lay brotherhoods. An extension of the Church system, membership consisted of upper-class men and women who ran the city’s hospitals, hostels, orphanages, eldercare facilities, and shelters for prostitutes and widows. They also managed the distribution of food, medicine, alms, and dowries to the poor—all in the name of Christ.
Hanging above the mantle in Ron Dart’s living room is a large oil painting of a sea-battered coastal landscape featuring an old lighthouse nestled amongst tall, wispy, and sun-browned grass on an otherwise barren landscape. The symbol of the lighthouse is telling for how the author of thirty-plus books, including The North American High Tory Tradition and Keepers of the Flame: Canadian Red Toryism, has been influenced by the countercultural icon, Hermann Hesse.
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Much significant work has been written on the life and prolific writing of Evelyn Underhill (certainly one of the most significant writers on the mystical life in the first half of thetwentieth century), but the research done on the impact of Baron Friedrich von Hugel on Underhill has tended to be leaner, thinner, and less developed. The sheer beauty and brilliance of this recent book by Wrigley-Carr on Underhill is the way the close and symbiotic relationship between von Hugel and Underhill is carefully and thoughtfully tracked and traced. The fact that Eugene Peterson wrote a rather lengthy foreword to
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One morning when she was twenty-six years old, Simone Weil waited outside an unemployment office, hoping to find more factory work. She’d been fired from her previous factory job and needed to find another. That morning, she did not find the work she needed; instead, she found something “miraculous” that transcended the grim business of factory work and unemployment. She found “total comradeship” with two fellow job seekers: a fifty-eight-year-old man interested in photography and an eighteen-year-old man with a taste for drawing. Weil writes of the encounter in her Factory Journal, “Total comradeship. For the first time in my
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Some Bible verses bother me, especially the ones that tell me to do things I don’t like. Then there are the scriptures that are downright troubling. I have a hard time with the verse in Philippians 2:3-4 that tells me to esteem others as higher, better, and more important than myself. In a way, I can even love my enemies more easily than esteem those with whom I disagree, because to love isn’t quite the same as to esteem. But to esteem others as higher? How can I imagine that? And, of course, the great trouble is that there is
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