This month sees a major expansion of our activities. Not only is Second Spring (the print journal) being relaunched with our long-delayed seventh issue, but we are starting a company (ResSource) to develop further educational initiatives over the coming years, including a new art school in Oxford. Cardinal Cahal B. Daly wrote one of the warmly appreciative letters we have received in the last few days. “I wrote to you earlier to express my admiration of an early number of the journal and my sense of the great good which it has the potential to do. My admiration for the journal has not lessened, nor has the quality of its content. I think that the time is now ripe for a journal of faith and culture such as yours and I wish it God’s blessing and every success.” We invite you to comment on the new issue either by letter or in the online community pages, where articles can be discussed at length, and ideas for future issues proposed.

ResSource is directed by David Clayton, Stratford Caldecott, and Léonie Caldecott. Over the next few years we hope to offer a range of educational courses, summer schools, conferences and cultural pilgrimages in different parts of Europe, including England, Spain, Italy and France - beginning with the Shakespeare summer school at St Benet’s Hall in Oxford this summer. David Clayton’s particular project is the creation of a new kind of art school, the inspiration for which was described in his article, The Way of Beauty, in issue Four of Second Spring. Practical classes in Oxford will teach techniques of painting and drawing that have been shamefully neglected by many contemporary art schools, and ways of seeing and contemplating that are essential both to naturalistic art and to Iconography. David has trained in sight-size drawing in Florence and will be teaching this technique, while distinguished iconographers in the Byzantine and Russian tradition will be offering tuition in their own style. There will also be lectures, seminars, and excursions designed to help more people understand the spiritual and cultural importance of the visual arts in the history of Europe – and the relationship of beauty to goodness and truth.

This will not happen all at once, but over the next year or two. As we grow, we will be looking for potential students, as well as organizations and colleges that may want to join our growing association and help to shape the courses that will be offered. If any of this interests you, please don’t hesitate to write to us. We remain in close contact, also, with the G.K. Chesterton Institute, and still hope to find a permanent home for the Chesterton Library after the end of our current lease in 2008.

A new book by Stratford Caldecott is published shortly by Crossroad and distributed by Alban Books in the UK. Called The Seven Sacraments: Entering the Mysteries of God (details are on the website) it is the first of a projected three books that attempt to open up the Catholic tradition in a fresh way, reaching out beyond the existing Catholic community to people whose interest is primarily in spirituality and mysticism, and who may be coming to the Christian tradition from completely outside it. The last chapter contains a proposal for the development of new approaches to catechesis, reviving the ancient practices of mystagogy. (That is the goal, too, of a new series being offered by CTS called Deeper Christianity.)

After mighty struggles, the seventh issue of our journal, Second Spring, is finally printed and available, approximately a year late. We apologise for the delay, necessitating the transfer of the journal back to the UK from Canada, and applaud your patience. As you will see from the image elsewhere on this site, our new cover (’Depend on Heaven‘) features a rather elegant Elizabethan gentleman holding a hand that descends from a cloud. The chap is sometimes supposed to be William Shakespeare, and he is on the cover to advertise our summer school, which this year takes place at St Benet’s Hall, the Benedictine college of Oxford University. Its title, ‘Shakespeare’s Secret: The Catholic Imagination in Elizabethan England‘, is not meant to imply that England’s greatest poet was a practising Roman Catholic, since that is clearly not the case. But the best scholarship suggests that he was Catholic by instinct and sympathy, and to some extent by upbringing. His imagination – and that of many of his contemporaries – was a Catholic imagination, but the formal affiliation with Rome was naturally suppressed in the course of the English Reformation begun under Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII. The dramatic thesis of Clare Asquith’s recent book, Shadowplay, is that like many another writer living in a police state, Shakespeare communicated his true feelings by means of a literary code that adds another whole layer of meaning to the text.

We are excited to have persuaded Clare Asquith to teach this new method of reading Shakespeare for the first time on our summer course. Together with the other lectures and events we have planned, the summer school will provide a unique educational adventure for anyone interested in the culture and religion of Elizabethan England. We have even booked a trip to Stratford to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest, with Patrick Stewart (better known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard) as the wizard Prospero. Places on this course will be highly sought after, so we advise you to write soon for further information and if possible make a provisional booking.

Second Spring 7 contains an article on Shakespeare but others on the enigmatic sculptor Brancusi (by Aidan Hart), the equally enigmatic theologian Bernard Lonergan (Tim Russ), the theology of the body and its implications for the way we view technology (Adrian Walker), the rights and wrongs of genetic modification, C.S. Lewis on human divinization, and much more, including a contribution from the well-known columnist James Schall. Just to clarify: the articles in the print journal are mostly NOT available online from this site or any other: if you want to read them you will need to subscribe, or buy issue by issue. Credit card payments for Second Spring can now be made easily through CTS.

It is worth mentioning that the proceedings of the ‘Landscapes with Angels’ conference on fantasy literature (2004) have also now been edited and produced as a beautiful special issue of The Chesterton Review. This can be ordered through the Institute web site.

How extraordinary it is to have a Pope whose first encyclical is on Love, and which he introduces in a recent address in the following words: ‘The cosmic excursion in which Dante wants to involve the reader in his Divine Comedy ends in front of the everlasting Light that is God himself, that Light which is at the same time the Love “which moves the sun and the other stars”. Light and love are but one thing. They are the primordial creative power that moves the universe.’ (A translation of the encyclical is available on the Vatican website and John Milbank’s commentary on it is available here.)

He goes on to say that while the pagan philosopher Aristotle also saw this fact about Love, Dante as a Christian was able to go beyond this. He knew that ‘God, infinite Light, whose incommensurable mystery had been intuited by the Greek philosopher, this God has a human face and - we can add - a human heart.’ Only God himself could reveal this to us: ‘God’s “eros” is not only a primordial cosmic force, it is the love that has created man and that bends before him, as the Good Samaritan bent before the wounded man, a victim of thieves, who was lying on the side of the road that went from Jerusalem to Jericho.’

He adds: ‘Today the word “love” is so tarnished, so spoiled and so abused, that one is almost afraid to pronounce it with one’s lips. And yet it is a primordial word, expression of the primordial reality; we cannot simply abandon it, we must take it up again, purify it and give back to it its original splendour so that it might illuminate our life and lead it on the right path. This awareness led me to choose love as the theme of my first encyclical. I wished to express to our time and to our existence something of what Dante audaciously recapitulated in his vision. He speaks of his “sight” that “was enriched” when looking at it, changing him interiorly. It is precisely this: that faith might become a vision-comprehension that transforms us.’

Thus he says, ‘Faith is not a theory that one can take up or lay aside… In an age in which hostility and greed have become superpowers, an age in which we witness the abuse of religion culminating in hatred, neutral rationality on its own is unable to protect us. We are in need of the living God who has loved us unto death.’

In this way, the Pope seeks to give new depth to the notion that Love is at the centre of Christian existence, as expressed both in the love that finds expression in marriage, and in the charitable works that we must engage in. By emphasizing ‘love for the other that no longer seeks itself but that becomes concern for the other, willingness to sacrifice oneself and openness to the gift of a new human life’ the Pope has (among other things) reaffirmed and strengthened the Theology of the Body developed by his predecessor, which we will learn more about on our Study Day on 20 May.

Here is a link to the new Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church

We wish our readers a happy new year. This will be an eventful time for us, as we re-launch our journal Second Spring and plan an expanding series of activities – the first of which were announced in the December newsletter below and, of course, in our EVENTS section. (You might make a new year resolution to visit our site each month and see what is new.) The Pope has indicated his concern that Catholics should develop the dialogue between reason and faith with an open-mindedness inspired by the Second Vatican Council. A recent address by Pope Benedict on this topic can be found in our Articles section. In this light of this concern, we have begun to revise and improve the Christianity Q & A section (formerly called ‘Questions Questions’), where readers can search for a deeper understanding of the faith. Dialogue with other religions is also important both to the Pope and to ourselves, and the Other Religions section of our site offers a wealth of material on this subject. If you want to discuss anything you find on the Second Spring site, one way of doing so is by joining our online community. You can reach all these links from the main menu on the left. We hope to hear from you soon!