Rhys Tranter's Blog

This July, Jenn and I journeyed to Rome as part of a Jubilee Year pilgrimage with a group of colleagues from St David’s Catholic College. We passed through the Holy Doors of St Peter’s, St John Lateran, St Paul Outside the Walls, and St Mary Major, where the remains of Pope Francis are laid to…

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It is now almost two decades since I first read The Brothers Karamazov. I began it in Bute Park, sitting under a tree overlooking the river. I remember that it was the Penguin Classics edition translated by David McDuff, and that I couldn’t put it down.

This week I had the joy of taking a group of students to the University of Oxford open day. In a few quiet moments, I had an opportunity to pray at the Oxford Oratory on Woodstock Road

In a November entry of The Genesee Diary, Henri Nouwen reflects on the writing and spirituality of Brother Lawrence

Dorotheus of Gaza, quoted in an entry from Henri Nouwen’s The Genesee Diary

A short passage from this morning’s Office of Readings in the Breviary (Friday, Week 10 of Ordinary Time)

While packing for a trip I pick up an old book I haven’t read for a long time. It’s a 1976 edition of Henri Nouwen’s The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery.

Xavier Beauvois’s 2010 film, Of Gods and Men, begins with this ominous epitaph from the eighty-second psalm. It is to be a portent of the narrative’s themes of death and dignity, explored in conversation with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.

“‘Solitude’ becomes for me less and less of a specialty, and simply ‘life’ itself. I do not seek to ‘be a solitary’ or anything else, for ‘being anything’ is a distraction. It is enough to be”

A quiet evening reading from Tanquerey’s The Spiritual Life, first published in 1923