Faith · Art · Museums · Heritage · People · Humour
Cecilia Giménez Zueco has died at the age of 94. She became famous in 2012 for her amateur restoration of the fresco Ecce Homo, painted in 1930 by Elías García Martínez. When a fresco in the Sanctuary of Mercy in the small Spanish town of Borja, in the province of
NB! · Architecture · Faith · Art · Paris
Faith · London · Monarchies · Observations · Society
But Christmas is surely not about inclusivity, nor about the brotherhood of foreign creeds, nor about any Oriental rites or political truisms. Christmas is the feast of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let me remind you that, under English legal requirements, the King of England must be a
NB! · Archive · Architecture · Faith · The East · Books
The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, from Conrad Grünenberg's "Description of a Journey from Constance to Jerusalem" (c. 1487). Baden State Library, Karlsruhe
NB! · Faith · Books
NB! · Archive · Faith · Mores · Society
In 1951 a group of Catholic activists hanged, and then burned, a wooden effigy of Santa Claus before several hundred children, in protest at the paganisation and commercialisation of the Nativity of Christ. The action was a one-off and, as we can see 75 years on, did not achieve
Faith · Art · Observations · Humour
I don't know about you, but at first I fancied that this portly eighteenth-century monk was holding a slice of pizza. In fact, the Portuguese brother is holding a reliquary of the Mother of God. The abode of this good soul is Newstead Abbey in England, which
Faith · Art · Books · Saint Petersburg
Your image, tormenting and unsteady, I could not touch in the fog. "Lord!" I said by mistake, Not thinking at all of saying it. God's name, like a great bird, Flew out of my breast. Ahead of me thick fog swirls, And behind me an empty
Faith · Art · Museums
Italian Renaissance painter Correggio, 1526, collection of the Uffizi Gallery
Faith · Books · London
The ghost of Jacob Marley appeared before Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve. Marley, the miser's former partner, found himself after death bound in chains made up of ledgers and cash-boxes: in life, after all, he had been far too greedy. Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol
Archive · Faith · Museums · Ethnography
The Novgorod Museum-Reserve has received a manuscript on birch bark, found in an Old Believer settlement on the Yenisei. The twentieth-century manuscript contains excerpts from the “Ladder of Divine Ascent” of John Climacus. In Siberian villages, letters and books continued to be produced on birch bark right up
Faith · Books · Rome
The Vatican's publishing house has issued a new edition of Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection's "The Practice of the Presence of God", which, in the words of Pope Leo XIV, shaped his own path to knowing the Lord and loving Him. The Pontiff has