Category: Texts
Contemplation in a world of violence: insights from René Girard and Thomas Merton
A talk prepared for a day retreat with Sebastian Moore on Contemplation in a world of violence: Girard, Merton, Tolle, organised by the Thomas Merton Society, held at Downside Abbey, Bath 3 November 2001. Appeared in the On Being Liked. I take it that contemplation is a certain sort of seeing. I take it from Girard that…
Faith beyond resentment: introduction
Introduction to the book Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay “How” Joseph must have thought, as he donned his Egyptian vizier’s robe, “am I going to enable my brothers to share all this abundance which has been given me? They think I’m probably dead, and effectively that’s what they wanted. They are a long way…
Looking backwards for Christmas
Who appears in our midst during midnight mass? I suppose most of us, nudged along by the ceremony of the placing of the babe in the manger, assume that it is the infant Christ. But the one who is present in our midst at midnight mass, as at every eucharist, is the crucified and risen…
Being saved and being wrong
However, the whole point of this new story is that it is not given us as completed, it is given us as something to be created. And we are not left entirely bereft of helpful signs, hints, rules of grammar
spluttering up the beach to Nineveh . . .
Chapter 4 of the Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay Русский
Girard’s breakthrough
A series of coincidences in early 1985 led me to René Girard’s Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. As I staggered through its third part I found myself being read like an open book, feeling like the woman at the well of Samaria, as she returned to her compatriots to say: “Come and meet…