Transfiguration Sunday

‘We mean all sorts of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal. It is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.’
- T.S. Eliot
‘Something beautiful [...]

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Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

‘Boredom is a serious matter… Our aversion to being bored has considerably greater significance than a mere reluctance to experience a state of consciousness that is more or less unpleasant. The aversion arises out of our sensitivity to a far more portentous threat… that we have no interest in what is going on.’
- Harry Frankfurt
‘I [...]

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Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

‘Even though we are now in faith . . . the heart is always ready to boast of itself before God and say: “After all, I have preached so long and lived so well and done so much, surely he will take this into account.” We even want to haggle with God to make him [...]

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Holiday Pictures 2008/9

As I mentioned the other day, Leann, Jacob and I enjoyed an extended stay in the Bay Area, first for Christmas and New Year’s and then a month of work in my company’s San Francisco office.  We missed our home in Cambridge, though I can’t say we missed the weather, and it was wonderful to [...]

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Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

‘[I]f there exists an end in the realm of action which we desire for its own sake, an end which determines all our other desires; if, in other words, we do not make all our choices for the sake of something else – for in this way the process will go on infinitely so that [...]

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