Modern world
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In memoriam Alvaro Mutis
It was a year ago. Alvaro Mutis passed away. This great Colombian writer deserves to be read and reread. This brilliant monarchist built a bridge between old Europe and South America. His poems, his stories, his novels carry us through our history, particularly through the figure of Maqroll el Gaviero, a solitary, disillusioned sailor… Continue reading
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From tradition…
“We are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; we see more than they do, and farther; not that our gaze is sharp, nor our stature great, but we are lifted up, exalted, by their gigantic size.” This quote from Bernard of Chartres (12th century) is found in Rémi Brague’s latest book, Moderately Modern (Flammarion Publishers)... Continue reading
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To which saints should we pray?
The Marcial Maciel case forces us to confront the question of Evil. Our era avoids engaging with it. What do we know of the devil's work, and what can we do to protect ourselves from it? After attempting to conceal the good in life, should we be surprised that evil is now revealed? The works of the devil are… Continue reading
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News about humility
The human vision of humility is like the human vision of love: limited. Humility must exert its influence at all times and in all places. Humility does not allow for a choice in whether or not to practice it. Humility thus demands infinite availability and infinite vigilance. It demands—a term that has almost disappeared from our… Continue reading
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Ernest Hello's news on Fear
But if we move from fear in general to the fear of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Olives, we will find silence more fitting than speech. His Passion is a series of excesses, many of which are unknown to us, says Angela of Foligno. But these sufferings, however dreadful they were, were successive, not simultaneous. In… Continue reading
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Letter to my friend Alvaro Mutis
One day in the 1990s, we were walking down the street, having just left the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, and Alvaro Mutis stopped abruptly. We were almost at the corner of Rue de Grenelle, and he said to me, "Emmanuel, I have the feeling we walked like this together a long time ago on a street in Cádiz. And we…" Continue reading
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Christian Testimony – 2
When I started this blog, the idea of writing about the liturgy came to me very quickly. Not to claim the status of an expert, but to share my experience of what represents the heart of a Christian's life. So there were two paths that had to converge: I had to describe the Mass (and… Continue reading
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In the polluted air of our societies
“We are told that the air of the world is unbreathable. I agree. But the first Christians found each morning at their doorstep an atmosphere saturated with vice, idols, and incense offered to the gods. For more than two hundred years, they were relegated, slandered, and marginalized by the current of the social river that swept 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 uncover the lies), owe most of their success to having paralyzed the forces of reaction against deceit and lies. This is on a moral level… Continue reading
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Hannah Arendt on human life
Modern theories, whose raison d'être is to obscure human nature and thus instill in humanity an overabundance of belief in itself, perpetuate this constant obfuscation. This constant obfuscation draws upon Simone de Beauvoir's thoughts on human life. Constant obfuscation, uprooting, infantilization… We must tell humanity that it… Continue reading
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Unamuno on human life
“I don’t want to die, no, I don’t, nor do I want to; I want to live forever, forever; and to live myself, this poor self, that I am and 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,” Yeats said, “all the wise words I have heard, all the anxieties I have caused my parents… all the hopes I have had, every life weighed in the balance of my own 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 desire must regulate, govern life. This sentence is… Continue reading
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Pascal on human life
And this excerpt from Pascal, an avowed and forced intimacy: “When I consider the short duration of my life, absorbed in the eternity that precedes and follows it, the small space that I fill and even that I see, lost in the infinite immensity of spaces that I am unaware of and that are unaware of me, I am frightened and astonished to see myself…” Continue reading