Tag: Guite

I WRITE this in Nashville, towards the end of an American lecture tour, but my thoughts are already straining and yearning towards England, not least because I am, at the time of writing, preparing for a singular event at the…

A PHRASE of Eliot’s that always haunts me is “distracted from distraction by distraction”, perhaps because, having something of a grasshopper mind, I am constantly distracted. The phrase comes in “Burnt Norton”, the first of…

AT SOME point in their lives, perhaps in some stark, lightless January of their middle years, the question must occur to every poet: Why am I doing this? What is the point? Certainly, some of the best poets — Milton and…

A NEW year is not only for new things, but also an occasion, a prompt, to make old things new; and nothing needs that renewal more than the over-familiar words of old prayers. One of the oldest and best is, of course, the…

I WAS sad to learn in the past week that the American poet Luci Shaw had died. It was not surprising news: she was in her late nineties and had been unwell, but it was still a loss. She was a very good poet and a great soul.…

THERE is no feast of Thanksgiving in the British national or church calendars, but it seems to me a good thing for any nation to set aside a day for gratitude, which is, in truth, the root of every other virtue. I am more…

I WRITE this on return from an extraordinary C. S. Lewis conference in Romania. How is it that more than 50 scholars from around the world, and many more students and interested members of the general public, all made the…

AS WE approach the new liturgical year, those of us called to preach through the lectionary will be blowing the dust off our biblical-studies lecture notes and getting our minds, once more, around what is distinctive about…

I STARTED dipping into Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy when I was myself a fairly melancholy teenager. I was reading it because I knew that Keats knew and loved it and drew inspiration and imagery from it, and I was, at that…