Yesterday was the Feast of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine. This feast was the occasion on which the the Venerable (soon to be Blessed) John Henry Cardinal Newman preached a characteristically brilliant sermon called “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training.” The whole thing is (of course) worth reading and re-reading, but here is my favorite passage:

Generation passes after generation, and there is on the one side the same doleful, dreary wandering, the same feverish unrest, the same fleeting enjoyments, the same abiding and hopeless misery; and on the other, the same anxiously beating heart of impotent affection. Age goes after age, and still Augustine rushes forth again and again, with his young ambition, and his intellectual energy, and his turbulent appetites; educated, yet untaught; with powers strengthened, sharpened, refined by exercise, but unenlightened and untrained,—goes forth into the world, ardent, self-willed, reckless, headstrong, inexperienced, to fall into the hands of those who seek his life, and to become the victim of heresy and sin. And still, again and again does hapless Monica weep; weeping for that dear child who grew up with her from the womb, and of whom she is now robbed; of whom she has lost sight; wandering with him in his wanderings, following his steps in her imagination, cherishing his image in her heart, keeping his name upon her lips, and feeling withal, that, as a woman, she is unable to cope with the violence and the artifices of the world. And still again and again does Holy Church take her part and her place, with a heart as tender and more strong, with an arm, and an eye, and an intellect more powerful than hers, with an influence more than human, more sagacious than the world, and more religious than home, to restrain and reclaim those whom passion, or example, or sophistry is hurrying forward to destruction.

When not editing an illustrious magazine, defining agenbites, or unraveling true-crime plots (cf. forthcoming FT), Joseph Bottum has been taking me through the history of the English novel. Pilgrim’s Progress (1676), Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Pamela (1740), so far—from the slough of despond to the garden of seduction. I must admit I gave up after fifty pages of Richardson’s Pamela, which struck me as drugstore romance baptized as a chastity catechism in want of a ruthless editor.

Now it’s on to Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, Tom Jones, with its archaically ironic (or ironically archaic?) narrator, its Allworthy magistrate, and its not-so-worthy foundling. The chapter headings alone are delightfully wry: “Containing such grave Matter, the Reader cannot laugh once through the whole Chapter,” “A Domestic Government founded upon Rules directly contrary to those of Aristotle”–immediately followed, go figure, by “One of the Most bloody Battles ever recorded in domestic History”–and, my favorite, “With some proper Animadversions on Bastards.” You might start to guess the storyline.

More to be said on that, but I’d like to go back to the beginning, where Fielding proposes his “Bill of Fare”–with a bit of advice to authors and readers alike:

The provision which we have here made is no other than Human Nature. Nor do I fear that my sensible reader, though most luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended, because I have named but one article. The tortoise—as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, knows by much experience—besides the delicious calipash and calipee, contains many different kinds of food; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject.

An objection may perhaps be apprehended from the more delicate, that this dish is too common and vulgar; for what else is the subject of all the romances, novels, plays, and poems, with which the stalls abound? Many exquisite viands might be rejected by the epicure, if it was a sufficient cause for his contemning of them as common and vulgar, that something was to be found in the most paltry alleys under the same name. In reality, true nature is as difficult to be met with in authors, as the Bayonne ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the shops.

Two and a half centuries later, appreciation of both ham and humanity is still in short supply.

The Democrats didn’t invite Archbishop Charles Chaput to their convention in Denver this year, for understandable reasons. Instead, they invited Sr. Helen Prejean C.S.J. to speak at their interfaith gathering. If they were trying to avoid controversy and shore up support from religious party members, however, they were in for a disappointment:

COLORADO CONVENTION CENTER — Following the hot topic of abortion, Sister Helen Prejean tackled another: calling for abolition of the death penalty to raucous applause at the DNC’s interfaith gathering.

She received nothing but a stony silence, however, when she questioned the basis of the biblical crucifixion story as a “projection of our violent society.”

“Is this a God?” Prejeans asked about the belief that God allowed his son, Jesus, to be sacrificed for the sins of humanity. “Or is this an ogre?”