Wednesdays with Words: Subtly Alters

I’m reading Beauty in the Word with a group of Reformed friends on Voxer. It’s an interesting dynamic as Caldecott, Beauty’s author, is stridently Roman Catholic and we find places of both profound agreement and disagreement (and, let’s be honest, confusion).

There is much to love about the book, I find I’m marking every page heavily – most with firm stars and YES! and some with ummm?? and No! Very little between.

But the Yeses are outweighing the Nos and I can see why it’s so beloved by so many- and I’m not quite through Chapter 1 yet.

The introduction “The Heart of the Book” lays out the main ideas carefully before he builds on it. In many places, I’m mentally changing “Catholicsim” or “Catholic” to “Christian” because I find firm agreement with what Caldecott posits, as here:

The ‘Catholicism’ in a Catholic school cannot simply be added on to an existing curriculum or atmosphere. Precisely because a religious faith affects everything, even changing the way we view the cosmos, it cannot be compartmentalized. (This is why faith seems so dangerous to some non-believers.) Revelation subtly alters the way every subject is taught as well as the relationships between them. What is revealed connects them severally and together to our own destiny, to the desire of our hearts for union with infinite truth. At that point, everything becomes interesting. There are no ‘boring’ subjects–nothing can be ugly or pointless unless we make it so, turning our backs on the Giver of Being. (pg 14-15, italics his, bold mine)

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