March 2019
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I've now watched both seasons of this Israeli TV show, and will repeat and upgrade my recommendation. It's one of the few TV series that I would want to watch a second time. Its portrait of the Shtisel family includes a number of subplots, and it occurred to me a couple of days ago that…
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Subtitled "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs." If you were paying much attention to music in the early 1990s, you probably were aware of it, even if you weren't especially interested in contemporary classical music. This recording was something of a crossover hit: You can read all about the piece itself and its fortunes, especially the fortunes…
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Seeing is more than indifferently reflecting (as a mirror reflects all that passes within range). It is a vital process that directly affects our lives. To see, perceive, means to receive into oneself, to submit to the influence of things, to place oneself within their grasp. Necessarily, the will mounts guard over the vision. One protection…
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Because I didn't get out of it anything close to what Gary Saul Morson does in this New Criterion piece, "The Greatest of All Novels." Tolstoy had an amazing capacity to understand “particular moments” in all their unrepeatable complexity. Where theorists, and even other great novelists, saw a smooth curve, he detected the infinitesimal deviations from…
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Because my wife and I are chronically and apparently incorrigibly late almost everywhere we go, we did not go to our usual Ordinariate Mass yesterday morning. It’s on the west side of Mobile, and we live twenty miles to the east. It takes us most of an hour to get there. The Mass is at…
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The intellect cannot cope with such paradoxes, though it somehow senses the reality beyond all reality, the truth beyond all truth. Precisely here lies the danger. The mind must never allow itself to be misled into seeming 'comprehension,' into facile sensations or phrases with nothing solid behind them. The whole problem is a mystery, the…
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People, mainly. Those who speak to me, whose words I read; those with whom I associate or would like to associate; the people who give or withhold, who help or hinder me; people I love or influence or to whom I am bound by duty–these rule in me. God counts only when people permit him…
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Someone recommended this Israeli TV series a week or two ago. I've now seen most of the first series (there are two). It's really good. Very much recommended. It can be compared in a very broad way to Detectorists, in that it's a quiet, low-key story, warm and generous but not sentimental, devoid of cheap spectacle.…
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I've been wanting to read Romano Guardini's The Lord for some time. This past Christmas I received it as a gift but had not so much as opened it, so I decided to make it my Lenten reading. If I had looked first and seen that it's 625 pages long I might not have chosen it.…
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Amy Welborn had a post the other day in which she described going to an Ordinariate Mass. She mentioned that the ad orientem (priest facing the altar and away from the congregation) celebration "inexplicably terrifies and enrages some." It does seem to, and I'd go further: the entire traditional Mass, as it was celebrated for hundreds…
Light On Dark Water 