Go to the Beauty-in-Education blog if you are interested in education, cosmology, faith and culture.

Our Economy Project blog is about Christianity and society.

Each of these blogs also recommends a small selection of others that are always worth reading.

Articles recently added to this site include an excellent piece by David Clayton on Harmony and Proportion in art and music, and two of my favourite recent articles from Communio - Rodolfo Balzarotti on modern painters William Congdon and Mark Rothko, and a profound essay by William Brownsberger on Silence. Also added last month, a piece on causality and purpose by Glenn Olsen, and one on the spirit of the liturgy applied to architecture, by Matthew Alderman. For all these and more, go to our Articles section.

We have some articles by the brilliant new head of the Congregaration for Bishops, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, but the full range is available on the Communio blog.

By the way, if you find any links on this site that no longer work, please help us by letting us know. We might be able to repair them – if not, they’ll be taken down.

Mars shining over a lunar rainbow. For details click on the picture.

NB. This page is currently being used as a gateway to our blog, but was previously the main Second Spring blog. The archive of postings can be found by scrolling down.

[Picture by Tunc Tezel in Turkey]

Continuing the lunar theme from last month, New Year’s eve saw a Blue Moon. Technically, this only means the second full moon in one month, which is fairly rare. But, much rarer yet, THIS full moon according to many observers was actually blue in colour, partly because of the atmospheric conditions under which many people observed it (looking up from the Oxford oratory at midnight it was surrounded by a double halo or aureole), and also because it was also a partial lunar eclipse, in which the moon grazes the earth’s shadow. This was the “rarest of all eclipses”, a lunar eclipse of a Blue moon on New year’s Eve – even rarer, it took place on the eve of a new decade. A fitting end to the International Year of Astronomy!

Portents in the skies, and on the earth

It does sometimes feel as though the end of the world we know is at hand. Recent crises and natural disasters seem to add up to a picture of a civilization teetering on the brink of chaos. Faith also tells us that, just as much as ecological imbalance, moral imbalance is unsustainable. The death of millions of innocents and the abject poverty of millions more cries to heaven for vengeance. The attraction of apocalyptic movies is that they enable us to express and indulge our fears – fears of the end of history, fears of full-force nature, fears of our own technology – from within the safety of a movie theatre. The recent disaster movie, 2012, is based on an ancient Mayan prophecy that many believe may be soon to come true. And when I say “many” I mean many, as a glance at the airport bookstall or the bestseller lists will reveal. Hundreds of books and millions of web pages can’t be wrong – or can they? For the full article, go here.