Should I add great Catholic essays to CatholicCulture.org’s library?
By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 03, 2025
By way of introduction to a new project, I might as well admit that it is getting harder and harder for me to think of new things to write about. Some of this probably has to do with aging, but some of it definitely has to do with the number of years I have been writing regularly on CatholicCulture.org—now over twenty, as represented by our archives, and probably some more scattered items before that.
Anyway, I’ve long had in mind a project of adding famous older Catholic essays to our library. After all, now that so much of what has been published in the last fifteen years or so has found its way online, along with many major Catholic works from across the ages, and also a number of outstanding Catholic research resources such as the original Catholic Encyclopedia, it is becoming less and less important to add research material such as Church documents to our own library here on CatholicCulture.org. For example, we made a point of adding the Catechism of the Catholic Church to our site as soon as possible after it was published in the 1990s, and in the early years we made a point of adding every encyclical ever written to our online library. We also digitized a collection of the Fathers of the Church early on. But while we still add new encyclicals to our library, this is increasingly redundant since the advent of the Vatican’s own website.
On the other hand, there are many pre-Internet individual Catholic essays that have never found their way online, or at least few readers know what or where they are. One particularly good collection of them in a book was done by Raphael H. Gross, C.PP.S. in 1946. That effort reached back over the preceding hundred years to create a prized collection known as A Century of the Catholic Essay for libraries. This contains 45 essays by the likes of Newman, Chesterton, Belloc, Sheed, and Knox, along with many other writers, including even the famous nineteenth-century American Orestes Brownson.
The very first essay in the book comes from Alice Meynell, who was at the center of a Catholic literary circle in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Though she may often be remembered now for the support she gave to a troubled Francis Thompson, author of the very well-known poem “The Hound of Heaven”, Meynell was a fine poet and essayist in her own right.
Some of this material has already been digitized. For example, there is a good online collection of Meynell’s work, including the first one in the collection I am using, entitled “The Rhythm of life”. But our readers are not likely to find this and other great Catholic essays in resources like that unless they know what they are and who wrote them so they can search for them.
So today I digitized Alice Meynell’s beautiful and brief essay, “The Rhythm of Life”, from the printed book on my own shelves, and it is now in our library:
The Rhythm of Life by Alice Meynell.
It’s a very brief essay, occupying only a bit over three pages in the book, and that makes it a very nice way to begin—especially since, as you will find, writers used much longer paragraphs in those days. There was then less rest for the eye than there is now, especially online where a great many things are broken into paragraphs every sentence or two or three—and the sentences, compared with master stylists like St. John Henry Newman, are far, far shorter.
So it was a more leisurely age. But I’d still like to know what you think of the experiment. If you read Alice Meynell’s essay and want to have (gradual) access to the rest of this fine Catholic collection, please let me know. I’m happy to keep adding and introducing them as time permits.
Read The Rhythm of Life by Alice Meynell, in our library.
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Posted by: winnie -
Feb. 10, 2025 10:41 PM ET USA
I just read and am reflecting on this. Not sure I grasp what she is saying.
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Posted by: winnie -
Feb. 10, 2025 11:38 AM ET USA
I am definitely interested!!
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Posted by: joshua+catholicculture3834 -
Feb. 05, 2025 7:47 AM ET USA
I have not read the essay yet but I do listen to many of the Catholic Culture audiobooks and think that selecting and republishing edifying material is valuable in itself. So my answer to the question posed would be yes, please do. Perhaps with a short post like this highlighting each essay, or at least a call out in the newsletter.
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Posted by: BPMDDS6349 -
Feb. 05, 2025 6:06 AM ET USA
Hi Jeff. I enjoyed reading Alice Meynell’s essay. I think that adding great essays to your digital library is a worthy project