To celebrate that kingdom
An eerily perfect etching casts a chilly spell over Jonathan Law. Winter in the cathedral city – somewhere in the north of England, some time (we might guess) in the earlier 1500s. Gothic structures...
View ArticleHieronymus Bosch – Christ Mocked (The Crowning of Thorns)
Continuing our occasional series featuring some of the finest pictures in London’s National Gallery, Gaw looks at a crucifixion scene that’s unusually troubling even for this genre… The current...
View ArticlePashka
In the first of two Easter Sunday posts exploring the festival as seen from diverse viewpoints, Mahlerman looks eastwards. With more than a millennium of Christianity behind them the Russian Easter...
View ArticleEaster with the Thomases
In the second of our Easter Sunday posts we explore a flower-covered car wreck and a rain-sodden graveyard to consider what Easter has meant to two of our grumpiest poets. I keep returning to the two...
View ArticleSt. Mary’s City – The Lost Capital of Catholic America
Today’s Dabbler letter from America finds the site of America’s first experiment in religious liberty in an unexpected place.. John Pendleton Kennedy’s 1848 novel Rob of the Bowl has all the hallmarks...
View ArticlePope Pius XII’s Ripening Delusions of Omniscience
As Pope Benedict announces his retirement, Frank recalls Pius XII (Pontiff from 1939 to 1958), an expert in all matters who felt qualified to lecture TS Eliot on literature… So sudden and unexpected...
View ArticleDabbler Diary – The Winchester Dead
At a quarter past one on Monday afternoon I descended into the crypt. The heavy door closed behind me and I was alone, facing a long pool of water in which the low grey-green ceiling arches were...
View ArticlePassio
Mahlerman offers a feast of great music for Easter Sunday… On this day last year seasoned Dabblers may remember that we travelled east, to the bleak wastes of Russia, and found Easter nourishment in...
View ArticleDabbler Diary – Childish Things
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. Then I had my own children and I got them all out again. And...
View ArticleDabbler Diary – Recusants, hoopleheads and grockles
The most memorable and piercing end of term report I received at school consisted of this single sentence: “Andrew’s attitude is a not entirely displeasing mixture of cooperation and sedition.” This...
View ArticleThe Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
When I stumbled across this Wikipedia article I though this sounds like a brilliant idea! Who wants to join? The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) is an environmental movement that calls for...
View ArticleThe Seasons: Lent, or How to Count to Forty
Ever wondered why the date of Easter is so unpredictable? Professor Nick Groom explains the bewildering mathematical equations required to calculate Easter, and why our day-to-day lives are still to...
View ArticleJohn Murray Spear & the Electric Messiah
There’s something cyborg about these early explorers of the meld between man and machine, all part of this week’s weird wikipedia article… John Murray Spear (September 16, 1804 – October 5, 1887) was...
View ArticleTwo Churches and a Baptism
In which the determinedly lapsed Rita fails to shake off her Catholic roots… When we crossed the Mason-Dixon line and I saw the Maryland countryside for the first time, I was reminded of England....
View ArticleOn Pope Francis and Thomas Jefferson
A Jefferson Bible Is Francis the anti-American Pope?… I’m not sure that I believe in a God, but I do believe in Pope Francis. The man known as “the Bishop of the slums” in his native Argentina...
View ArticleReview: Speakers’ Corner – Debate, Democracy and Disturbing the Peace by...
Brit reviews a new book that collects four decades’ worth of pictures of preachers and hecklers at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park… If you’re on Facebook you’ll have discovered that some of...
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