Sunday Mornings at Our House: Ireland on the Radio

We are up betimes at our house Sunday morning--except for the dogs, who go back to sleep--getting ready to attend 8:00 a.m. at the Church of St. Anthony of Padua. One highlight every Sunday is EWTN's Catholic Connection, with Kathy Kinnott broadcasting from Cork, Ireland--it's on at 6 a.m.

On Sunday, June 1 she had a really great episode on a publication distributed  in Ireland called Alive! and an interview with an English professor at Ave Maria University:

One of Ireland's most popular Catholic newspaper is the Alive! Kathy talks to founder and editor of Alive! Fr. Brian McKevitt, OP about the ups and downs of publishing a Catholic newspaper in an often hostile secular media environment. Part 2. The great British poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Blessed John Henry Newman were masters of the art of verse in their day. Kathy and her guest to Dr. (Michael) Raiger, assistant professor of literature, Ave Maria University Florida, talk about how the beauty and depths of their poetry are interwoven with the beauty of God and his creation.

Here's a blog post from Ave Maria University that gives excellent background to Dr. Raiger's in the interview:

Dr. Michael Raiger, Assistant Professor of Literature at the university, has devoted much of his academic career to recovering Coleridge’s Trinitarian thought. Embedded in the life of Coleridge was a stay in Malta, from 1804 to 1805, followed by a nine-month sojourn through Italy, including five weeks in the Vatican where he studied Catholic art and architecture during the Easter season of 1806. It is during his stay in Malta that Coleridge’s decade-long fling with Unitarianism (Coleridge’s father was an Anglican minister in the Devonshire village Ottery-St. Mary) ended with an acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity—we have the precise moment recorded in one of his notebooks, dated Feb. 12, 1805, 1:30 p.m., in which Coleridge wrote: “No Christ, No God…No Trinity, No God…Unitarianism in all its forms is Idolatry.” It is this seminal moment, argues Raiger, and the lengthy stay in the Sistine Chapel the following year, that informs Coleridge’s most important reflections on the relationship between art and aesthetics on the one hand, and religious sensibility and theological speculation on the other. The claim is a bold one, and goes against forty years of scholarship on Coleridge, which sees him as borrowing bits and pieces from German Idealism, mostly Kantian, in the construction of a rather esoteric and inconsistent defense of Christianity. To the end of countering this position, Dr. Raiger will travel to Malta in mid-November to deliver a paper entitled, “The Italian Influences on Coleridge’s Later Poetic Principles,” at the international conference “Encountering Malta: British Writers and the Mediterranean, 1760-1840.”  . . .

As a follow up to his discussion of poetry and Romanticism, here's one of Hopkins' "nature" poems, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire"--

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.