Ascension Thursday to you, that is.
I have to leave in a bit for a family-related jaunt up north (not as far as NYC, but still north). While I’m there, I hope to finish up my NYC blogging and do a lot of reading.
In the meantime, my links first:
Wildcat/Flannery-related:
(In it you can read about my super-close connection to the film’s production. I mean, I’m practically in it, honestly.)
- Follow-up blog post here.
- The last episode of the first season of the FYI Podcast with Villanova’s Chris Barnett, in which we discuss Wildcat as well as the runner’s up for our list.
The Hillbilly Thomists are going on tour in July and August:
Very nice Marian roundup at Art & Theology, including this link:
ESSAY: “Mary: Evolution of a Bookworm” by Joel J. Miller: “It’s unlikely the historical Mary could read at all, but medieval Christians transformed her into an icon of literacy,” often showing her with a book in hand, whether as a child learning to read from her mother, Saint Anne; at the Annunciation, with the book of Isaiah, the Psalter, or a book of hours splayed open on her lap; or teaching her own child, Jesus, how to read. Drawing on the research of Laura Saetveit Miles, author of The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England [previously], Joel J. Miller discusses how images of Mary reading “rode a wave of rising female literacy and simultaneously encouraged its expansion.”
Railwalks: Walk Britain by Rail
Like most people, we used to think that you have to drive to reach interesting, beautiful remote places. Then we discovered how much of the country is walkable by public transport, particularly by rail. These are some of the walks done by Steve Melia, aka the Green Travel Writer, between railway stations around Bristol, where he lives. The purple and blue lines are day walks. The orange ones involved an overnight stay.
Railwalks.co.uk was formed when Steve met Daniel Raven-Ellison the founder of Slow Ways and Andy Stevenson, creator of Point2 Guides and whose research area is walking guide materials development at the University of Worcester.
Related, from the Convivial Society
But valuable as these perspectives may be, it was another insight that finally compelled me to write this post. Two or three weeks back, Audrey Watters wrote in defense of walking in her excellent newsletter about fitness tech, Second Breakfast. The title of that installment was a line from the filmmaker Werner Herzog: “The world reveals itself to those who walk.”
That’s a wonderfully concise and profound observation. Of course, I was inclined to agree with the sentiment because it captures something I have been articulating, at much greater length, for some time now. The world is not simply present to us in its fullness and depth by virtue of the fact that we are capable of glancing at it. Instead, if we are to see the world, we must attend to it with care, patience, and even love.
This kind of attention can only unfold under certain conditions—solitude, silence, stillness—and in relation to certain virtues—humility, perseverance, charity. Among the conditions conducive to attentiveness I would also include deliberate slowness. Past a certain speed, we simply cannot perceive the world in depth…
….To walk, then, is to inhabit a fitting scale and speed. It is the scale and speed at which our bodies are able to find their fit in the world, and the world rewards us by spurring our thinking and disclosing itself to us. Perhaps this is the deeper fitness we should actually be after.
Thanks for the links to articles about walks, especially in connection with public transit in England (and Europe, I suppose). I first found about such walks while reading the “Space” trilogy of C.S. Lewis and it has left an impression on me of wanting to walk some in the Lake Country of England.
Your CWR piece is quite good.