modern world
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In memoriam Alvaro Mutis
It was a year ago. Alvaro Mutis was returning to heaven. The immense Colombian writer deserves to be read and reread. This brilliant monarchist projected a bridge between old Europe and South America. His poems, his stories, his novels carry and carry our history through the figure of Maqroll el Gaviero, a solitary, disillusioned sailor. Continue reading
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From traditional…
"We are dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants; we see more than they do, and further; not that our gaze is piercing, nor our height high, but we are raised, elevated, by their gigantic stature." This quote from Bernard of Chartres (12th century) found in Rémi Brague's latest book, Modérément moderne (Editions Flammarion), Continue reading
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Which saints to turn ?
The Marcial Maciel affair forces us to ask the question of Evil. Our era avoids dealing with it. What do we know about the devil's work, and what can we do to protect ourselves from it? After trying to hide the good in life, should we be surprised that evil is coming to light? The works of the devil are Continue reading
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Humility News
The human vision of humility is like the human vision of love, reduced. Humility must exercise its authority at all times and in all places. Humility does not allow one to choose whether it should be exercised. Humility thus demands infinite availability and infinite vigilance. It demands a term that has almost disappeared from our Continue reading
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Fear news from Ernest Hello
But if we move from fear in general to the fear of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Olives, we will find silence more appropriate than words. His passion is a series of excesses, many of which are unknown to us, says Angela of Foligno. But these sufferings, however terrible they were, were successive, not simultaneous. In Continue reading
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Letter to my friend Alvaro Mutis
One day in the 90s, we were walking down the street, leaving the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, and Alvaro Mutis1 stopped dead in his tracks. We were almost at the corner of Rue de Grenelle, and he said to me: "Emmanuel, I have the impression that we walked like this together a long time ago in a street in Cadiz. And we Continue reading
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Christian testimony – 2
When I started this blog, the idea of writing about the liturgy quickly came to me. Not to claim expert status, but to share my experience of what represents the heart of a Christian's life. So there were two paths that had to merge: I had to tell the Mass (and Continue reading
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On the stale air of our societies
"We are told that the air of the world is unbreathable. I agree. But the first Christians found every morning at their door an atmosphere saturated with vices, idols, and incense offered to the deities. For more than two hundred years they were relegated, slandered, and marginalized by the current of the social river that carried them away. Continue reading
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On totalitarian states
"Totalitarian states, which alternately use lies and violence (lies to cover up violence and violence to silence those who discover the lies), owe the greater part of their success to having paralyzed the forces of reaction against imposture and lies. This is on the moral level. Continue reading
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Hannah Arendt on human life
Modern theories whose raison d'être is to confuse the nature of man and thus give him an overabundant belief in his person discuss this permanent confusion. This permanent confusion uses Simone de Beauvoir's thinking on human life. The permanent confusion, the uprooting, the infantilization... We must tell man that he Continue reading
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Unamuno on human life
"I don't want to die, no I don't want to, nor do I want to want to; I want to live forever, forever; and to live me, this poor me, that I am and that I feel myself to be today and here, and that is why the problem of the duration of my Continue reading
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Yeats on human life
“When I think of all the books I have read,” said Yeats, “of all the wise words I have heard, of all the anxieties I have given to my parents… of all the hopes I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for some Continue reading
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Simone de Beauvoir on human life
"To declare that life is absurd is to say that it will never have meaning. To say that it is ambiguous is to decide that its meaning is never fixed, that it must always be earned."* A formidable declaration of powerlessness draped in an expression of the will to power, or how envy must rule, govern life. This sentence is Continue reading
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Pascal on human life
And this extract from Pascal, admitted and forced intimacy: "When I consider the small duration of my life, absorbed in the preceding and following eternity, the small space that I fill and even that I see, lost in the infinite immensity of the spaces that I ignore and that ignore me, I am frightened and astonished to see myself Continue reading