Friday Links
June 13, 2025
St. Anthony of Padua with
the Child Jesus by Gaspar de Crayer
B.D. McClay: I Can Read You Like a Book: On Northanger Abbey
Singing God’s Grandeur: Dana Gioia on Gerard Manley Hopkins
Wilfred M. McClay reviews Arthur Kirsch’s Auden and Christianity
“Man Is Born to Behold Beauty“
The Art of Friendship - Summer 2025 Young Catholic Leaders Initiative Workshop
B.D. McClay: I Can Read You Like a Book: On Northanger Abbey
Toward the end of Jane Austen’s first completed novel, Northanger Abbey, its heroine, Catherine Morland, is faced with just such a puzzle. Her love interest, Henry Tilney, is to host her; his father, General Tilney; and his sister, Eleanor at his home in the nearby village of Woodston. General Tilney has stressed to his son that he is not to take any great pains with the dinner he will serve them; Henry is therefore leaving ahead of the rest of the family to make sure all is in readiness. To Catherine, who doesn’t understand why the mismatch between what the general has requested and what Henry is doing, he explains that his father’s repeated statements that any old meal will do are simply not true. In his absence, Catherine is left to puzzle over “the inexplicability of the General’s conduct … That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood?”
Singing God’s Grandeur: Dana Gioia on Gerard Manley Hopkins
Hopkins is one of the great Christian poets of the modern era. His verse is profoundly, indeed almost totally, religious in subject and nature. A devout and orthodox convert to Catholicism who became a Jesuit priest, he considered poetry a spiritual distraction unless it could serve the faith. This quality makes his popularity in our increasingly secular and anti-religious age seem paradoxical. Yet the devotional nature of his work may actually be responsible for his continuing readership. Hopkins’s passionate faith may provide something not easily found elsewhere on the current curriculum – serious and disciplined Christian spirituality.
Grappling with God: The faith of a famous poet
Wilfred M. McClay reviews Arthur Kirsch’s Auden and Christianity:
The notion that religious faith and serious thought are mutually exclusive categories always struck Auden as risible and unintelligible. But he would have bristled at an effort to separate out his religious beliefs and restate them as systematic propositions, or examine them independently or thematically, rather than see them as players in his rich and various inner symbolic drama. Such an undertaking would probably have struck him as unspeakably vulgar and, moreover, an invasion of his privacy, putting his devotional life on display and forcing him unwillingly to be judged by the public standard of a “religious” man, a role for which he felt singularly ill-equipped.
“Man Is Born to Behold Beauty“
James Matthew Wilson (or, Jimmy, as his mom calls him when she wants him to rubberneck) on knowing and beauty and why we’re here:
The human act of desiring the truth begins in wonder. The experience of wonder is always a movement of reason and desire. . . . Wonder begins in response to the world being composed of ‘strange things’ (per Aristiotle). There must be strange things in the world that stimulate me to wonder about the. We only wonder about the world because the world was first wonderful.
The Art of Friendship - Summer 2025 Young Catholic Leaders Initiative Workshop
For millennia, philosophers and poets, saints and artists have puzzled over these myriad questions regarding friendship. To address these questions, the Collegium Institute's Young Catholic Leaders Initiative invites high school students to register for our 5th annual summer seminar, The Art of Friendship, taking place June 16-17 (9:00am-5:30pm) and June 18 (12:00pm-8:30pm) at the Penn Newman Center. This seminar aims to treat friendship not as a theory but as an art, identifying the particular set of practices and actions associated with the classical ideal of friendship and seeking to embody them in our own lives. Over the course of three days, students will engage in lively seminar discussions, art museum visits, scavenger hunts, pilgrimages, plays, and feasts as they think through and live out friendship. Ultimately this seminar aims to form and foster friendships among students, with Plato and Aristotle, Virgil and Dante, Cicero and Aelred, Rosalind and Celia, Chesterton and Shaw, Francis and Clare, Raymond of Capua and Catherine of Siena, and many more as guides in the art of friendship.
