A lovely prayer by one of my French confrères: I offer this day To be a Christian is to recognise that I am a son or daughter of the Father, Brother or sister of the Beloved Son and dwelling place of the Spirit. Every morning, I can show this by receiving each day as a gift, a grace, As a path to w...

Well, it's now been 5 days since I got back from my annual retreat (see previous blog posts); 5 days since, like Peter, James + John in the account of the Transfiguration, Jesus invited me (not that I had much choice! :-) to come back down the mountain into the "world" and share with others the grac...

Well, tomorrow I leave for Brittany to do my annual retreat with about 30 other Brothers (all French) at the Benedictine monastery of Landevennec, situated on an isolated peninsula on the west coast of Finistère (Brittany, France). I've been on retreat there before a couple of times and there are s...

Worth Abbey, the location for the enthralling and ultimately moving 2005 BBC 2 reality series "The Monastery" (see here and here) is the subject of the following article on the BBC News website. It discusses their taster weekends that they initiated in the aftermath of the tv series and the thousand...

An actor whose committed performances (seemingly influenced by Method-acting techniques) have brought him a cult following in the acting world, seems to be having a very bad time of late (see below). The rant that is mentioned below has so many expletives in it that i feel I can't put a link to it h...

I'm a real sucker for anything space-related (sci-fi, NASA, SETI, Hubble telescope images, etc...). Indeed, my blog used to be called "The Final Frontier: Chaplain's Log" in a not-too-subtle nod to Star Trek lore. This is partly fed by just a boyish sense of escapism in the same way that Westerns in...

This is an interesting article comparing Obama and Bush in terms of their respective styles of public speaking that I found over at the website of the British Jesuits (www.thinkingfaith.org): A Tale of Two Presidents Michael Sean Winters  Is Barack Obama the High Priest to George Bush’s preacher?...

The following article from The Guardian newspaper's Film Blog sheds some interesting light on how this truly wonderful film (set in Mumbai) is being received by certain high-profile Indians. It raises the intriguing argument that it has taken a Westerner to produce what may well be the most authenti...

This breathtaking photo is a genuine optical image taken from the far side of Saturn. Here's the explanation from Astronomy Picture of the Day: In the shadow of Saturn, unexpected wonders appear. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn recently drifted in giant planet's shadow for about 1...

This year it was the turn of the English Brothers to host our annual Youth Gathering for students aged between 15 and 18 from De La Mennais Brothers schools. In recent years participants have come from France and England only (as members of St. John the Baptist Province: France-Italy-England), but t...