Author: Rhys Tranter

Rhys Tranter is a writer and teacher based in Cardiff, Wales, UK. He is the author of Beckett's Late Stage (2018), and his work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a number of books and periodicals. He holds a BA, MA, and a PhD in English Literature.

by on
Thomas Merton

In a recorded conference for novice monks at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky, the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton suggests that simplicity is both a reward and a method in the life of prayer:

“The life of prayer is […] the simplest possible kind of life. Simplify your mind. Simplify your thinking. Simplify your thinking about yourself and simplify your thinking about life and simplify your thinking about God”

— Thomas Merton

by on
Photograph: Rhys Tranter

What can great works of art teach us? How do they speak of the joys and trials of our everyday lives?

There is so much to recommend about Giuseppe Mazzotta’s Yale course on Dante in Translation that it’s difficult to know where to start. So, why not start at the beginning?

In the opening chapter of Mazzotta’s Reading Dante, a revised transcript of the lecture series, he traces a vision of Dante’s masterpiece as a kind of encyclopaedia, or ‘circle of knowledge’, that follows the path of a human life.

(more…)

by on
A photograph of me taken in Switzerland, June 2017. Photograph: Jennifer Whitney.

On this day in 2017 I had a conversion experience that changed my life. I was listening to a consultant during a routine cardiology appointment when suddenly everything came into the sharpest focus. In one powerful, convicting moment, I knew I was no longer an atheist. I was a Christian. 

(more…)

by on
Photograph: Rhys Tranter.

In his commentary on the book of Job, Pope St Gregory the Great outlines a distinction between the imposition of power led by will and the testimony of quiet authority led by conscience:

“When Paul says to Titus: ‘Command these things, teach them with all authority’, he is not recommending the domination of power but the force of his disciple’s life. A man teaches with authority what he first practises himself before preaching to others, for when conscience is an obstacle to speech, what is taught is more difficult to accept.”

I am reminded of Pope St Paul VI’s observation that “[m]odern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (Evangelli Nuntiandi, 41)

by on
St Patrick’s, Soho, London. Photograph: Rhys Tranter

On Saturday, I took a train to London to attend Summit 2026 at St Patrick’s church in Soho. Centred around the theme of Freedom of Heart: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life, the day offered a rich lineup of talks, reflections, and Q&As across topics like hope, inner freedom, and applying spiritual principles to active life in the world.

The plenary speakers began the day with two morning presentations. We heard from Bishop Erik Varden—who recently delivered the Lenten Spiritual Exercises for Pope Leo XIV in Rome—and Fr Jacques Philippe, a cheerful, popular author of books on prayer who draws deeply from the Carmelite tradition. Among the afternoon sessions were talks by two sharp and energetic Dominican nuns, Sr Carino Hodder and Sr Lucy Cahill, whose candid approach to the Rule of St Augustine was entertaining and inspiring. Archbishop Richard Moth was also in attendance for part of the day.

(more…)

by on

Today the Vatican has published Magnifica Humanitas, the first Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIV.

It has been released on the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, which was a rallying call to safeguard human dignity at the height of Industrial Revolution.

The new document calls for a careful and prudent approach to our current digital revolution in order to “safeguard the human person in the time of artificial intelligence”:

Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history.

— Magnifica Humanitas, 233

by on
Photograph: Rhys Tranter

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, the editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, shares this on art, the true and the beautiful:

“Art, therefore, does not deal only with what is externally beautiful and harmonious, although this is rightly considered to be its primary end (CCC 250I). Gertrud von le Fort, one of the greatest Catholic authors of our [just-completed] century, says of writing (and similar things can be said also of the other arts) that it shares with the Christian faith the ‘irresistible inclination to embrace the ostracized and the condemned, even the guilty who are condemned, to accompany on their confused path to the abyss those who have gone astray, to draw the failing and the dying to its heart. […] Genuine poetry remains, unflinchingly, the great lover of the guilty and the lost.’”

Perhaps the words of this author will help us to understand better some of the ways of contemporary art and to see more clearly where today’s artists, in their often bewildering quests, are on the trail of the Savior’s truth.

— Living the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Vol. III: Life in Christ.