Edmund Rice International

The three days in ‘short-term guest’ involvement at Findhorn (July14 – 16), on the Firth of Moray, in far north-eastern Scotland, gave me a good insight into Findhorn as a major eco-centre, with a strong base in eco-spirituality. In fact, along with my week in Schumacher College (Devon, UK) in late 2008, it seemed that […]

For Saints Francis and Clare, this little town clinging to the flanks of a rugged ridge overlooking the Umbrian plains was where it all began. Casting off their old ways of thinking and of doing, they started a revolution in how the Church understands the Gospel. A seminar was held here for 250 religious, focusing […]

Everybody lives in a watershed, and most of us live in the valley of a large river. Geographers, and many indigenous myths, point to the river as the one that carves the valley, and shapes the surrounding slopes. In Gaillard, we live on the Arve, a word that’s so old the linguists say it pre-dates […]

Both hemispheres have just passed through equinox. The north is sailing into spring, the south rolling into autumn. Major religious feasts follow this point – Passover for Jews, Easter for Christians. But equinox, when length of day equals length of night, is also a point of balance. World food, world oil, world finance, are all […]

Geneva is limping towards Spring – cold chill rain, light snow, the trees still bare. But, in the pre-dawn dusk, the blackbirds have started to sing, softly; the magpies are renovating their untidy nest, the wood pigeons are courting, the first primroses came out this week. The world can take heart. An old argument is […]

Sterkfontein is one of several sites in the World Heritage area labelled ‘The Cradle of Humanity‘, just northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. A group of us undertaking the first ever Qalehong course, designed and run by Br Kevin McDonnell cfc, of the Catholic Bible College in Johannesburg, visited Sterkfontein, as we began to sound the […]

The beech forest is the classic ‘wood’ covering most of old Europe, below the conifers on the steep slopes, and above the poplars and willows in the wetlands. I was walking on the slopes of Salève, the mountain that overlooks Geneva, south of the Arve River. I had climbed through hazel and alder, oak and […]

I came across the paragraphs below in a Zenit report of the daylong forum organized by the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See entitled “For Everyone, Everywhere: Universal Human Rights and the Challenge of Diversity,” held at the Istituto Maria Santissima Bambina in Rome on Oct. 16. “Legionary of Christ Father Thomas Williams, author of […]

The natural world calls us into communion, several times a day. We are invited to drop our version of things, and enter Earth’s understandings, God’s love palpable in created energies. The other night I was sitting quietly by the Arve, silvery in the twilight, under Saleve, which was blushing a soft pink as the sun […]

Wandering around our new suburb, Gaillard, I came on a grey granite slab standing upright, under two huge oaks. One simple sentence on the slab informed me that seventy soldiers, French and Austrian, had been buried here, together, after a battle on June 21, 1815 (three days after the Battle of Waterloo). This was sobering […]