St Dominic was a paradoxical figure. “His face was always radiant,” Blessed Jordan chronicled, and “by his cheerfulness he easily won the love of everybody. Without difficulty he found his way into people’s hearts as soon as they saw him.”

Earlier this year Charity Sunshine Tillerman Tillemann-Dick, a coloratura soprano, died aged 35. She had long struggled with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension that enlarged her heart to more than three times normal size and, in 2009 and again in 2012, she underwent double lung transplants.

The phrase ‘salt of the earth’ is commonplace in modern English. It comes, of course, from Jesus’ words in our Gospel passage today (Mt 5:1b-2, 13-16). It has come to describe those who are commonsensical, practical, honest, reliable. But is that what Jesus had in mind?

“My soul is bursting as it magnifies the Lord. My spirit is overjoyed with God my saviour. He looks on me in my lowliness and raises up all the lowly. He loves me in my emptiness and fills all the hungry with good things.

In the Gospel of John is the story of a crowd of vigilantes about to stone a woman caught in adultery (Jn 8:1-11). Jesus intervened, writing the sins of the crowd in the sand and charging them: “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.”

The 19th century Scottish author, George Macdonald, was something of a renaissance man. A minister, Christian apologist, poet, and pioneer in fantasy fiction, he was a major influence

Vanity of vanities, the Preacher says, all is vanity! (Eccles 1:2; 2:21-3) In so many ways, ours is an age of self-absorption, even self-obsession. More than 80 million photographs are uploaded to Instagram every day, mostly people’s selfies

The summer of 1221 was a hot one. Global warming meant Europe was one and a half degrees warmer than usual, and was experiencing strange weather, melting glaciers, wheat growing all the way to Scandinavia, grapes all over England.