Friday Links
September 15, 2023
Dream of the Rood: A translation from Tessa Carman and J.C. Scharl
Susannah Black Roberts in Mere Orthodoxy: The Birth of Comedy
Valerie Stivers on The Rise of Stella Maris
DT & Collegium: Dying Well to Live Well
Dirty Work: An Interview with Mike Rowe in Plough
Dream of the Rood: A translation from Tessa Carman and J.C. Scharl
Yesterday was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, which is a commemoration of two events: St. Helena’s discovery of the True Cross, Calvary, and the tomb of Christ, which the Romans had buried under a temple to Venus; and the dedication of a church on that site. A new translation from Tessa Carman and J.C. Scharl appeared last year in The Lamp. It’s a good one to read in commemoration of this feast.
Susannah Black Roberts in Mere Orthodoxy: The Birth of Comedy
This long, intriguing, and wonderful essay by Susannah Black Roberts is worth your time. She wrestles with big ideas and critiques the vitalist embrace of pagan ideas, demonstrating the far greater vitality of a culture whose strength is Christ.
“You might ask the question this way: In our post-Christian age, disenchanted and flattened and sapped of life, what if we reached back not to Christianity but to what was before? What if Christianity itself was the thing that began the sapping of our powers, the loosening of our sinews, the worship of weakness and all that is vile?”
Valerie Stivers on The Rise of Stella Maris
“When Cormac McCarthy died in June at age eighty-nine, the news touched off grief and adulation such as contemporary literary authors rarely inspire. Musicians, scientists, conservatives, Catholics, all have claimed him. One man circulated and posted the notes he’d taken after a series of phone calls with the author in the early nineties. A woman confessed to having stolen his garbage. As for me, I drove the mountain roads in Vermont this summer, thinking about McCarthy and imagining things. I might learn to can peaches, buy a gun, order iodine tablets, fit a hand pump on the well, dig a root cellar, stock an apocalypse pantry . . .
The response is McCarthy’s due, as he is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest novelists. But it also seems like a demand for a different kind of literary fiction than the kind we currently have, one with concerns Christians will recognize, penned by a different kind of writer.”
DT & Collegium: Dying Well to Live Well
Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things magazine for our online Global Catholic Literature Seminar, Dying Well to Live Well. In this seminar, we’ll pair acclaimed modern novellas—Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” and J.R.R. Tolkien’s purgatorial fantasy “Leaf by Niggle”—with the most famous medieval and renaissance devotional manuals by Thomas à Kempis and St. Robert Bellarmine on making ready for life’s ending. Through these diverse depictions and reflections, we’ll investigate questions of how we can live full lives in the awareness of suffering, mortality, and human limitation. How should we understand the rich tradition of “Ars Moriendi” in its Christian expression? How can we face the inevitable with a sense of peace, acceptance, and confidence? And how might life’s impermanence provide, not a reason for despair, but an orientation toward greater meaning and purpose? Early Bird registration ends on September 18.
We will meet four Monday evenings in October, 7:00-8:30pm ET on Zoom. For more information and to register, please go here.
Dirty Work: An Interview with Mike Rowe in Plough
“All our choices these days feel binary. If I advocate for one thing, people assume it’s because I’m against another. So when I say more people should learn a trade, it often comes back as “Mike is anti-college.” That’s not true, of course. I’m opposed to unnecessary debt, and I think the cost of a four-year degree is out of control. But arguing in favor of the trades only feels “radical” because it conflicts with the long-held belief that a four-year degree is the best path for the most people.”
