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Issue 13 – Christ the King 2022

Feuilleton

Feuilleton

Odds and ends from the staff of The Lamp.

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✥ We like very much what Rowan Williams writes in his review of Father Thomas Joseph White’s new book: “God alone is God; no Führer, president, guru, therapist, or lover has the absolute claim on our love and obedience that God has—which liberates us to say no in God’s name wherever such ersatz divinities try to own or instrumentalize our unique personal dignity.”

✥ When explaining his editorship of the Tracts for the Times and the British Critic magazine, Saint John Henry Newman said that his writers “belonged to various schools, some to none at all. The subjects are various,—classical, academical, political, critical, and artistic, as well as theological.” His editorial ideal continues to be our own: “Every one has his own taste. You object to some things, another to others. If we altered to please every one, the effect would be spoiled. They were not intended as symbols è cathedrâ, but as the expression of individual minds; and individuals, feeling strongly, while on the one hand, they are incidentally faulty in mode or language, are still peculiarly effective. No great work was done by a system; whereas systems rise out of individual exertions. . . . The very faults of an individual excite attention; he loses, but his cause (if good and he powerful-minded) gains. This is the way of things: we promote truth by a self-sacrifice.” 


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