English sci-fi writer, John Wyndham, is best known for novels like The Day of the Triffids and The Village of the Damned. But short stories were really his thing. In one, entitled “The Wheel”, a young boy playing in the yard discovers pulling his cart is easier if he attaches turning round bits of wood to it.
Dominicans can be very black and white: St Dominic’s mother dreamed of him before his birth as a black-and-white dog carrying a torch to light up the world;[i] their habit, given by Our Lady, is also black and white;[ii] and so is their coat of arms.[iii] Why those colours? Let me suggest five reasons…
Martin Scorsese’s film, Shutter Island, is a neo-noir psychological thriller set in 1954. Leonardo DiCaprio plays U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels who visits the island with his partner to investigate the disappearance of a patient from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
London-based Aesthetics and Anti-Aging Consultant, Cindy Jackson, was six years old when she was given a Barbie doll and she long fantasised about looking like her.
When Mary MacKillop was about 20 years old, living in Portland, Victoria, she was accidentally locked in the church overnight. Sounds rather spooky, but Mary counted it an opportunity to spend all-night in vigil with Our Lord.
It’s great that despite COVID-19-Δ restrictions we can still meet. I guess by now the Baby Boomers are all now Maybe Zoomers! 6 parts
You could call it the Council of the Friars – yet none was there, or only one. “The Great Council”, as the Fourth Lateran was known, included the greatest mediaeval pope, Innocent III, 71 patriarchs and metropolitans, 412 other bishops, around 900 abbots, priors and periti, together with envoys of the emperor and monarchs.
The true (verum), the good (bonum) and the beautiful (pulchrum) – it was a 13th century German Dominican and Doctor of the Church, Albert the Great, who first identified these as the three ‘transcendental properties of being’.
There are 37 miracles recorded in the Gospels, most of them in Matthew, Mark and Luke. John’s Gospel, which we heard today, is different. John only reports eight miracles, six of them uniquely among the evangelists, and all of them at much greater length.
There’s never a good time to introduce laws that sanction the killing of vulnerable human beings such as the terminally ill, elderly, frail and suffering.
I know what it’s like. My Dad’s nursing home is closed to the public and my Mum is in hospital, allowed no visitors. Today I’m saying Mass in an empty cathedral and miss my people very much.
On this day in 1535, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London woke old Bishop Fisher at 5AM for his 9AM execution. He decided to go back to sleep so to save his strength for the occasion!
