by St Peter Chrysologus Feast of St Irene the Righteous of Chrysovalantou Anno Domini 2023, July 28

by Arthur Boers - excerpted from his book Living Into Focus Commemoration of St Kyriake the Great Martyr Anno Domini 2023, July 7

We often hear as a traditional invocation, especially on the lips of Catholic priests, “Let us begin, as we begin all things, in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” But why should we begin all things in this way? What is it about the Sign of the Cross that makes it not only a suitable but a universal commencement?

by Ken Myers Feast of the 14,000 Infants Slain by Herod in Bethlehem Anno Domini 2022, December 29

By James Matthew Wilson During the first months of the pandemic, I wrote a series of news-article poems recording the events, public and private, of the period. They were published serially in Dappled Things magazine and together constitute a narrative that, even at their most private or domestic, constitute a record of the American experience as a whole. The concrete fruit was a book-length poem; the intellectual fruit was a new and deepened perspective on the divisions in our country and the strange commonality Americans experience in and through that division. I will reflect on the composition of the poem and also on another long poem written through international disaster, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets , which also sought to be a national poem in a time of division and destruction. Presentation at 10:00am on Friday, January 13 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall

By James Matthew Wilson In a few paragraphs, the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar diagnosed the emptiness of the modern age, an emptiness produced by the elimination of beauty as an attribute of reality. We’ll reflect on von Balthasar’s bold claims and have a look at Plato’s great “palinode” in the Phaedrus , where we see with a clarity and concision still unrivaled how and why human life is ordered by, to, and through beauty. Presentation at 2:00pm on Saturday, January 14 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall

By Fr John Strickland I will open by introducing the anthropological pessimism of “late-medieval” Western piety as a crisis of heavenly immanence and then present the way in which Petrarch, in his text Secretum , handled the fear it provoked—by secularizing Christendom’s imperative toward personal transformation. Next, I’ll jump forward in time to the “desecration of the world” that occurred during the so-called Enlightenment to frame a second case of anthropological fear and fortitude: the poet Percy Shelley’s project of cosmological reenchantment (using works like Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ). Finally, I’ll sketch the rise of totalitarian ideologies as context for Albert Camus’s struggle against anthropological despair from The Plague to The Fall . My goal is to present the history of modern Christendom as a cause of agony not only for Christian intellectuals but for secularists like the “father of humanism” (Petrarch) and a pair of atheists as well. Presentation at 10:00am on Saturday, January 14 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall

By Jake Meador Whether you consider the latest statistics on our nation’s mental health or simply listen to the people in your life, it is clear that ours is a moment of intense fear and anxiety. In part this anxiety arises from the radical uncertainty of our moment. Having turned away from any form of thick identity that obstructs individual choosing, we now find ourselves uncertain who we are, what the good life is, or what it means to be good. Still further, we are troubled by the uncertainty and opaqueness of the world we are rapidly moving toward. All that remains, we think, is the individual person, existing as a kind of “point of aggression” amidst a hostile and indifferent world. This entire way of imagining reality is foreign to the truth of Scripture and wisdom of the church, however. The faith teaches us that we are embedded members of a coherent creation, not detached points of aggression existing in space. If we wish to regain some sense of footing in the world, we would do well to begin by considering what the world actually is. Presentation at 1:30pm on Friday, January 13 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall

By James Matthew Wilson The most perfect American poem of the twentieth century is surely Wilbur’s “Baroque Wall Fountain.” In an age where the secularity of the fine arts seemed final, Wilbur achieved a perfect vision of the Christian understanding of the person and the world, one that summons all of us to change our lives. Presentation at 11:30am on Friday, January 13 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall