Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ

Best Ignatian Songs: Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

by Jim Manney

Some time ago I featured the Natalie Merchant song “Wonder” in our occasional “Best Ignatian Songs” feature. Here is another. It’s a setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.” The song is in the middle of a concert Merchant gave at a TED conference. Go to the 16 minute, [...]

{ 1 comment }

A Poem for the Fourth Friday in Lent

by Jim Manney

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw, ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light’s delay. With witness I speak this. But where I say Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament [...]

{ 1 comment }

Behold

by Tim Muldoon

Back in my coaching days I learned to develop a particular kind of vision: I saw details of my athletes’ performance that others would miss.  This one slouched a bit; that one overreached; and so on.  The vision was the product of careful, attentive, even loving work.  What others saw was just a boat full [...]

{ 2 comments }

What to Avow or Amend

by Jim Manney

For Ash Wednesday — a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins and a painting by Dennis McNally, SJ, inspired by it. The poem is titled “The Lantern Out of Doors.” Sometimes a lantern moves along the night, That interests our eyes. And who goes there? I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where, With, all [...]

{ 0 comments }

Faith and Action

by Tim Muldoon

Ignatian spirituality owes a great debt to Aristotle. Not a surprise, really–Ignatius absorbed the theology of Thomas Aquinas, who imbibed the philosophy of Aristotle (by way of his teacher, Albert the Great, and in conversation with Muslim and Jewish philosophers, who had been using Aristotle for centuries). Here’s my thumbnail sketch; it’s on my mind [...]

{ 1 comment }

God's Grandeur

by Jim Manney

When he died in 2006, Stanley Kunitz was eulogized as the most accomplished American poet. Kunitz’s favorite poem was “God’s Grandeur” by the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. He reads the poem, and explains how he found it, in this video produced by the Favorite Poem Project. (H/T to Jim Campbell for unearthing it.)

{ 0 comments }

Ron Hansen's Exiles

by Jim Manney

Ron Hansen is one of my favorite writers.  I heartily recommend his latest novel Exiles.  The novel tells the story of how the account of a maritime disaster in 1875 moved the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to return to writing poetry. The disaster was the shipwreck of the steamer Deutschland.  Among the lost were [...]

{ 2 comments }

Hopkins the Poet

by Jim Manney

I love the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He’s difficult. One critic says that a sign of excellence in a poet is the number of different ways you can read his work. By that measure, Hopkins is a great poet. But Hopkins is worth the effort it takes to read and understand him. Paul Mariani, [...]

{ 1 comment }