The Monthly Salon: August
The Monthly Salon: August
Come and join a summer conversation
Hello everyone. I am technically still on holiday, but that gives you all the more time and space to set your own terms of discussion here, in our regular monthly salon. This is the Abbey’s regular space for readers to open and steer the conversation on any subject they’d like to. I encourage anyone to dive in - please don’t be shy, especially if you have never commented before.
While I’m here, I’m flagging up a recent podcast conversation I had with Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and the host of Maiden Mother Matriarch here on Substack. Louise is a really smart and interesting thinker, and I enjoyed the conversation a lot. I have been wondering which essay of mine would be best to accompany it - there are quite a few. I think I would settle on Watch The Great Fall, from February last year. It seems appropriate to so many things that are happening right now.
In other news, I have two forthcoming speaking events in the USA in October to flag up: Against Christian Civilisation, the 2024 Erasmus Lecture in New York City; and The Machine in the Garden, a talk about Christianity and nature, in Buffalo, NY.
I’ll be back in action here on 25th August. Future writing will include the conclusion of my Fifty Holy Wells series, as well as the next in my Lives of the Wild Saints, featuring St Modomnoc of Ossory, patron saint of bees. I also have several essays in the pipeline, including: the long-planned story of why I became an Orthodox Christian; an exploration of the spiritual void at the heart of Western culture and where it is leading us; and, inspired by my conversation with Louise and the recent carnage in the streets, an essay on the deculturisation of England and how the country might recover its soul.
If you’d like to support me in this work - and join in the conversation here - please do think about a paid subscription, if you can manage it. In the meantime, over to you.
I just saw that a new Charles Taylor was published back in the end of May. The title is, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment and here is part of the description of its content:
Reacting to the fall of cosmic orders that were at once metaphysical and moral, the Romantics used the symbols and music of poetry to recover contact with reality beyond fragmented existence. They sought to overcome disenchantment and groped toward a new meaning of life. Their accomplishments have been extended by post-Romantic generations into the present day. Taylor's magisterial work takes us from H lderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarm , and on to Eliot, Milosz, and beyond.
In seeking deeper understanding and a different orientation to life, the language of poetry is not merely a pleasurable presentation of doctrines already elaborated elsewhere. Rather, Taylor insists, poetry persuades us through the experience of connection. The resulting conviction is very different from that gained through the force of argument. By its very nature, poetry's reasoning will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic. But at the same time, its insight is too moving--too obviously true--to be ignored.
He’s getting up there in years, but maybe you could have a conversation about this with him and post it on YouTube? I think it would be most interesting.
https://whiteoakbooks.net/book/9780674296084
Paul, I just wanted to say thank you for the "Orthodoxy for Beginners" post a couple of weeks ago. I've been reading Kallistos Ware, but I am grateful for a few other suggestions to look into.
My question for other readers: I've been going to liturgy pretty consistently for about a year and a half. I love it. I've been able to bring my kids a few times. But any ideas others have for encouraging a spouse or other family members to try it out would be greatly appreciated! (Or maybe that's not the way, I don't know. Just curious how others have gone about approaching someone who is reluctant to try attending a Divine Liturgy on Sunday.)