Winters in the World is among the best history books that I have ever read. Eleanor Parker is a fine scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature as well as a master storyteller.
In Winters, she explains the ingenious ways in which the once-pagan Anglo-Saxons adapted their legends and their perceptions of the year to their Christian faith, creating a calendar that is “at one and the same time firmly rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture and fully part of the wider international church”. To some extent, the result of this remarkable inculturation remains with us today.
After reading this book, you won’t look at the seasons the same way ever again.
Winters in the World is a beautifully observed journey through the cycle of the year in Anglo-Saxon England, exploring the festivals, customs and traditions linked to the different seasons. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including poetry, histories and religious literature, Eleanor Parker investigates how Anglo-Saxons felt about the annual passing of the seasons and the profound relationship they saw between human life and the rhythms of nature. Many of the festivals we celebrate in Britain today have their roots in the Anglo-Saxon period, and this book traces their surprising history, as well as unearthing traditions now long…
I guess I’ve been on a liturgical-year kick. John Henry Newman was probably the finest preacher of the nineteenth century, and his gentle sermons are chock-full of shrewd insights into the Gospel and into human psychology.
Dr. Melinda Nielsen has combed through the hefty multi-volume collection of Newman’s sermons and selected twenty-two for various feast days. Her pairing of sermons with feasts is excellent, despite some differences between Newman’s calendar and our own.
Read one sermon of Newman’s, and you will agree with what a contemporary said of him: “He laid the finger how gently, yet how powerfully, on some inner place in the hearer’s heart, and told him things about himself he had never known till then.”
Percy wrote this comic take on the dissolution of American society in the late 1960s, but his apocalyptic descriptions of a galvanized and fragmented citizenry now seem almost prophetic.
The protagonist, Dr. Thomas More (a descendant of Sir Thomas More), is a brilliant doctor and inventor who is also a drunk, a melancholic, and a womanizer. While I am only one of those (I’m not telling you which), I related to More’s psychological profile and general attitude perhaps more than to any other fictitious character with which I am familiar.
Love in the Ruins is a book with several LOL moments, and the masterful way that Percy wrote it will keep you in delightful suspense until the very last page. An immensely satisfying read.
A pair of profound dystopian novels from the “brilliantly breathtaking” New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of The Moviegoer (The New York Times Book Review).
Winner of the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, the “dazzlingly gifted” Southern philosophical author Walker Percy wrote two vividly imagined satirical novels of America’s future featuring deeply flawed psychiatrist and spiritual seeker Tom More (USA Today). Love in the Ruins is “a great adventure . . . so outrageous and so real, one is left speechless” (Chicago Sun-Times), and its sequel The Thanatos Syndrome “shimmers with intelligence and verve” (Newsday).
Michael Foley’s fans have been devoutly drinking with the Saints for years thanks to, well, his book Drinking with the Saints. Now it’s time for dinner!
The inimitable theologian and mixologist teams up with the priest and TV chef Leo Patalinghug in a culinary romp through the liturgical year.
Dining with the Saints brings the Catholic liturgical year to life, pairing over two hundred saints' stories with an irresistible smorgasbord of international recipes. Featuring dozens of new and exciting recipes, it provides an unforgettable feast that sinners and saints will enjoy.
