Friday Links
B.D. McClay in Commonweal: You Can’t Earn Easter
Alfred Nicol reading at The William Corbett Poetry Series
Alan Jacobs in Hedgehog Review: A Novelist’s Reflections on Useful Fictions
Dana Gioia on Charles Baudelaire
Kevin Perrotta in The Word on Fire on “The Hidden Life of St. Thomas More”
B.D. McClay in Commonweal: You Can’t Earn Easter
Do we sometimes focus too much on suffering and penance, finding ourselves incapable of real joy? B.D. McClay explores this question in a wonderful essay from 2018. “Since what is offered by Christ is impossible to earn,” writes McClay, “this retreat into penance can represent a way of turning away from God in a more subtle guise.” This, I think, is absolutely right. The liturgical seasons help to steer us away from focusing only on suffering and penance, on our unworthiness. Read the whole thing, it’s good.
Alfred Nicol reading at The William Corbett Poetry Series
The fantastic Alfred Nicol will be reading at MIT on Tuesday, April 18 at 7pm. What better way to recover from paying taxes!
Alan Jacobs in Hedgehog Review: A Novelist’s Reflections on Useful Fictions
Alan Jacobs on the novelist, Hope Mirrless and her fantasy novel, Lud-in-the-Mist.
“The makers of modernity, those who helped shepherd the move from a world of porous selves to the Modern Moral Order of rational and sociable beings, thought the world they promoted was more true, more closely correspondent to what-is-the-case, than the “superstitious” world of porous selves had been. Mirrlees is less sure. One of the recurrent themes of Lud-in-the-Mist is the suspicion that the move from a world led by a magical and mysterious aristocracy to a world governed by law is not necessarily a closer approximation to the way things are.”
Dana Gioia on Charles Baudelaire
Wonderful video presentation from Dana Gioia on Charles Baudelaire.
Kevin Perrotta in The Word on Fire on “The Hidden Life of St. Thomas More”
Kevin Perrotta writes of St. Thomas More, “While there is much we can learn from him about holding fast to our convictions in times of great stress, this great saint can also teach us about how to handle the common, ordinary seasons of our lives.”
