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Showing posts from April, 2017

Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘Pied Beauty’, ‘Carrion Comfort’, and ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’

Newman House, University College Dublin, facing St. Stephen's Green On Thursday the 27 th of April Will Johnston, Robert Gribben and I gave a presentation on Gerard Manley Hopkins to the Institute for Spiritual Studies at St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. Here is the second part of my contribution to the evening.   Pied Beauty Glory be to God for dappled things –    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;    Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;       And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange;    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)       With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:                                 Praise him. At its most immediate ‘Pied Beauty’ is a poem

Poetry and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Bridges

St Peter and St Paul Church Yattendon, with the Bridges family cross in the foreground On Thursday the 27 th of April Will Johnston, Robert Gribben and I gave a presentation on Gerard Manley Hopkins to the Institute for Spiritual Studies at St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. Here is the first part of my contribution to the evening. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Bridges were born three months apart in the year 1844. Their families were devoutly religious, also inspired by the movement of reform within the English Church which we today call Anglo-Catholicism. The Hopkins family attended High Anglican churches, including All Saints’ Margaret Street in London, a church designed and built by William Butterfield, the same architect who designed the cathedral down the hill from here near the Yarra River. The books tell us Hopkins and Bridges met at university, but they were moving in the same social and cultural circles for years, taking in the same air. In a p

Rowan Williams : an Abiding Attention to Christianity

This profile of Rowan Williams was written by Philip Harvey for the ‘Heroes of the Faith’ page of The Melbourne Anglican , April 2017. Rowan Williams, as a child, grew up in a Welsh Calvinist village. We encounter this formative world of Wales throughout his writing, for example in his translation of the Nonconformist poet Ann Griffiths: Under the dark trees, there he stands, there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes? I thought I knew a little how he compels, beyond all things, but now he stands there in the shadows. It will be Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning, when I shall wake to see him as he is. It’s only when the family moved to another village that Rowan first encountered High Church Anglicanism, with its strong emphasis on social action and a sacramental worship that engaged all the senses. As a young man Rowan almost became a Benedictine, a decision that his biographer Rupert Shortt avers would have disappointed some of his female f