The Democracy of the Dead

From Winter to Spring

2012-01-11T08:46:00.000-08:00

For our next four sessions we'll be discussing the following:

Tuesday, February 7. Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church by H.W. Crocker III. We'll read the first half, beginning with the prologue and continuing through chapter 11.

Tuesday, March 6. We'll continue with Triumph, reading chapters 12 through the epilogue.

Tuesday, April 10. "The Paradiso" from The Divine Comedy by Dante. Recommended translations include the Ciardi (Norton Press) and the Mandelbaum (Everyman's Library).

Tuesday, May 1. Flannery O'Connor's volume, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. We'll concentrate on the following short stories: "A Good Man is Hard to Find," "The River," "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "Good Country People," and "A Late Encounter with the Enemy."

All of the meetings will be at 7:45 PM in the Common Room on the second floor of the Rectory (entrance on Wellington Ave. behind the Church).

Chesterton Shorts

2011-12-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, January 11 at 7:45PM. The text that we'll consider will be a collection of G.K. Chesterton's short Fr. Brown mysteries: The Innocence of Fr. Brown. We'll focus on "the Blue Cross, "The Invisible Man, "The Three Tools of Death," and "The Sign of the Broken Sword." This volume is available for free for the Kindle or iPad or at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/204

A Reconsideration of Eden

2011-10-24T11:39:00.000-07:00

For our next meeting, which will be on Tuesday, November 22, 2011, at 7:45PM, we will be discussing C.S. Lewis's novel, Perelandra.

View from the Peak

2011-08-24T09:31:00.000-07:00

For our next meeting, which will be on Tuesday, October 4, at 7:45 P.M., we will be reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain.

The Faces of Conversion

2011-06-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

For our next meeting, which will be on Tuesday, August 16, we will read Evelyn Waugh's classic Brideshead Revisited.

The Church's Newest Blessed on the Relationship of Faith and Reason

2011-05-04T08:47:00.000-07:00

For our next session (Tuesday, June 7 at 7:45pm), we will read Blessed John Paul's 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio. The Vatican offers the text for free on their site here.

Thomas More Contra Mundum

2011-04-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

For our next meeting, on Tuesday, May 3, we'll be discussing Robert Bolt's play, "A Man for All Seasons."

Listening to our Patron

2011-03-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Our next text will be a collection of works by St. Alphonsus Liguori, the patron of our parish. The book is Alphonsus de Liguori: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1999). It is part of the Classics of Western Spirituality series. The meeting will be Tuesday, April 5, at 7:45 P.M.

We'll focus the discussion on the "Spiritual Writings" (pp. 57-164) and the works on "Prayer" (pp. 271-314).

Further up the Mountain

2011-02-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

After taking a break from Dante's Divine Comedy, we return to the Purgatorio for our next meeting: Tuesday, March 1, at 7:45p.m.

The Confessions

2011-01-07T10:56:00.000-08:00

For our next meeting, which will be Tuesday, February 1, at 7:45 P.M., we will be reading St. Augustine's Confessions, particularly books 1-10. Any translation is fine, but a recommended one would be the Henry Chadwick translation published by Oxford World's Classics.

Atheist Delusions

2010-12-08T08:44:00.000-08:00

For our next meeting, which will take place on January 4, at 7:45 P.M., we will be discussing David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). This is a spirited critique of certain modern misunderstandings of reality in general and Christianity in particular.

Rising to the Challenge

2010-11-03T08:04:00.000-07:00

Our great books seminar meets next on Tuesday, December 7, at 7:45 P.M. and will discuss G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. The text may be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/130

From the Grey Town to Reality

2010-10-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

Our Great Books seminar continues at St. Alphonsus on Tuesday, November 2, at 7:45 P.M. with C.S. Lewis's minor classic, The Great Divorce. Lewis came up with the title in response to William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In this work, Lewis examines the nature of the choices that lead either to heaven or to hell.

Into the Dismal Abyss

2010-09-29T13:01:00.000-07:00

The next meeting of the St. Alphonsus Great Books seminar will be on Tuesday, October 5, at 7:45 P.M. in the Rectory Common Room (second floor). The text we will be discussing is the "Inferno" from Dante's Divine Comedy. Recommended (but not required) translations include the Ciardi (published by Norton Press) and the Mandelbaum (Everyman's Library).