“Shakespeare strikes fear into the hearts of many theatregoers because no one wants to leave one of his plays feeling stupid. And yet, so often, that point is not grasped by those who make theatre: they want to be seen as edgy and creative, and so play around with the plays until they resemble a …
“The answer for me to E. J. Dionne’s rhetorical question about why people stay Catholic is simple: I attend Mass to deepen my relationship with the Lord. It matters not who wears the miter and carries the crosier. I don’t care if my priest is gay. The hierarchy and politics of the church offends me …
Continue reading ‘Letter to the Washington Post, 30 August 2018’ »
A highly placed Vatican source claims that Cardinal Gerhard Müller, together with three experienced CDF priests, was dismissed by Pope Francis because they all had tried to follow loyally the Church’s standing rules concerning abusive clergymen. In one specific case, Müller opposed the Pope’s re-instatement of Don Mauro Inzoli, an unmistakably cruel abuser of many …
Until the mid-20th century, most vineyards were small and worked mainly by hand. After the Second World War, as French vineyards modernised and the industry grew into a global economic behemoth. To them, what seems like a story of technical and economic triumph is really the tragic tale of how wine lost its way. Before …
At the beginning of his autobiography “Speak, Memory”, Vladimir Nabokov writes: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness ……Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he …
