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Nothing is more ruinous than talkativeness and more harmful than an uncontrolled tongue; and nothing is more destructive and disorganizing to the treasure of the soul. For whatever we succeed in building in ourselves every day is destroyed by much talking, and what we collect together with great labor our soul dissipates again through this disease of the tongue.

St. Philotheus of Sinai, Forty Texts on Sobriety, Text #15

Abba Poemen once said: “The nature of water is soft, that of stone is hard. But if water ceaselessly falls drop by drop, the stone is worn away. So it is with the word of God. It is soft and our heart is hard; but the one who hears the word of God often, opens his heart to the fear of God.”

Sayings of the Desert Fathers

“The evil that men do lives after them / the good is oft interred with their bones,” Marc Antony says over the body of Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, and whether he means it ironically or not, he’s right: people are reduced, in their deaths, to a few details, a few sharp lines. When someone dies like Renee did, in the middle of a political conflagration, the lines are extra sharp, extra crude. One headline screams that Renee was a domestic terrorist, while another proclaims her a martyr. All that’s left of a person is a few seconds, a few scraps of information, a single moment that the political machine tears to pieces, looking to extract whatever it can use to gain more power over people’s imaginations.

Long before a federal agent shot her and she became a headline and a symbol, Renee was the best singer – and listener – in my church youth g

A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.

Proverbs 18:2, ESV

Why did not somebody teach me the constellations and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don’t half know to this day.

Thomas Carlyle

The world is full of resurrections. Every night that folds us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early, and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it―the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life.

George MacDonald

We attempt to define a person, the most commonplace person we know, but he will not submit to bounds; some unexpected beauty of nature breaks out; we find he is not what we thought, and begin to suspect that every person exceeds our power of measurement.

Charlotte Mason

Here is where Charlotte Mason’s work is perhaps most pertinent to our day: Every aspect of her philosophy is based upon the irreducible mystery of personhood, and hence is inherently resistant to the idea that humans can, and ought to, be put into a box. At its worst, our education system aims effectively to churn out servile, homeless robots. And even in classical Christian schools and homeschooling cooperatives, we can easily reduce the work of education to producing men and women who can diagram a Latin sentence and score high on tests but who do not love beautiful things and cannot distinguish between tools that ennoble and tools that demean. But most importantly, Mason outlined how to live out such a philosophy and then lived it out. She didn’t merely theorize or wander peripatetically with her devotees but tested her theories by the Great Tradition and by decades of practice.

“Like religion, education is nothing or it is everything—a consuming fire in the bones.” —Charlotte MasonDuring World War Two, as the Allie

When the monks at Iona began that magnificent work of art and devotion which we know as The Book of Kells, they did not have to persuade their fellow Christians or the pagans around them that there really was such a thing as beauty. One thing that strikes me with immediate force is how colorful the art of the Middle Ages was. All it takes is a glance at the Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures and you know that the dark brooding of the Renaissance malcontent has not yet settled upon the soul. But in every healthy society, artists wish to create what is beautiful or noble or grand or sweet, and that is why they learn the painstaking lessons from those who came before them. If someone says that beauty was only for the rich, I should like to remind them of folk music, of the bright and dashing costumes that peasants once wore for festive occasions, of the staggeringly beautiful churches and cathedrals open to everyone, of children everywhere, and of the natural world that was so near.

Evangelizing in a world that lacks the spiritual, cultural, and intellectual foundations of pre-20th century missionaries is a challenge tha

The greatest thing a man can do, the thing that brings him closest to God, is to preserve the marvels that exist, given that he cannot create them.

Simone Weil, Venice Saved (1943)

Contrary to conventional – urban – wisdom, most peasants wish to keep their land. I recently asked an Indian cotton farmer why he continued his back-breaking labour, when he hardly covered the cost of cultivation, and he had to work other jobs to fund his loss-making farm. Why did he not simply sell his land and focus on those more lucrative activities? ‘The land is our mother,’ he replied. ‘Do you sell your mother?’

Far from being a relic of the past, peasants are vital to feeding the world. They need to be supported, not marginalised

This world is a contest and a field for contest. This time is the time of struggle...the King lays no limit on his warriors until the contest is over; then every man will be brought to the doors of the King of Kings and there tried as to whether he has gained victory in the contest, or has turned his back. There is only one law there: to watch and resist.

St. Isaac of Syria, Directions on Spiritual Training

I say, gentlemen, to those who voted to kill me, that vengeance will come upon you immediately after my death, a vengeance much harder to bear than that which you took in killing me. You did this in the belief that you would avoid giving an account of your life, but I maintain quite the opposite will happen to you. There will be more people to test you; up to now, I have held them back, but you did not notice it. These will be more difficult to deal with, as they will be younger, and you will resent them more. You are wrong if you believe that by killing people you will prevent anyone for reproaching you for not living in the right way. To escape such tests is neither possible nor good; rather, it is best and easiest not to discredit others but to prepare oneself to be as good as possible. With this prophecy to you who convicted me, I part from you." Socrates, from Plato's Apology, 39c

from "Walsingham" by Walter Raleigh

“That truest tree—glad with glory, morning-mantled— was ringed with riches. A veil of gems wrapped the shaft of the Ruler’s chosen tree. Yet, beneath that jewel-bright shield, I beheld an ancient anguish. The cross began to bleed, its right side shedding sweat.”

from The Dream of the Rood

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital....Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves.

Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France

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