Some souls seem to bend more easily toward goodness than others. Even in childhood, this disparity haunted me—not simply as a psychological curiosity, but as a theological one. That question eventually led me to study mental health, education, and ultimately, the human psyche as a psychotherapist. For the past several
Milosz, Herbert, and Myself (1956-1967) I have often been asked to describe what it was like to spend an evening relaxing with Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert. But I have a problem, summed up by the old joke that “Whoever says they remember the Sixties wasn’t really there.” The most
There is a goal, but no way.—Kafka It is undeniable that there is an unknown (the geographers of antiquity drew an analogy of this unknown with the famous expression terra incognita with which they marked the edge of their great map). At the margins of reality that the eye embraces,
Once upon a time, not even in this century, in the increasingly more remote Anno Domini 1999, I was a freshman in college. And I read a book in French literature class that I somehow still remember rather well. It was the essay collection Mythologies by the twentieth-century French cultural critic
Catholic discussion of evolutionism did not end with the publication of Humani generis. Although it is not my intention to write a history of the three quarters of a century since publication of the encyclical, a few words about subsequent Catholic thought on the two issues that the encyclical addressed
I was a doctoral student when a friend passed on to me a second-hand copy of a book by the Belgian Benedictine Jean Déchanet, a monk of Saint-André de Bruges. Déchanet, born in 1906, was known to me as a medieval scholar. His work on William of Saint-Thierry, the chief