Lizardi Saucedo

by Ramón López Velarde In these days when people have been talking about Cervantes , Altisidora has come to my mind. I have smelled her enervating hair that poisons the darkness of the moonlit fullnight. And I have let myself be carried away by listening to the mezmerizing of her ukulele. Perhaps the pages that I like the most in Quixote, have been those that describe the Hidalgo's stay between the dukes; between the duke Maleante and the Propicia duqueza. You can hardly smell the garlic that hurt the nose, and the action glides along neatly and gleefully like a game of chess played in a large room overlooking to a garden. We lived in their house, mischief, cordiality and health. Let's not think about politics nor money. We are -as they say- at our ease. The aforementioned Altisidora pretends to be in love with Don Quixote. Courtship of glances glimpses, rancorous mudslinging, sweet-songs, complaints and agonies... All this against the knight. And a cat arrives in a fit of rapt...

by  J. J. Arreola In a solitary place whose name does not really isn't care to bring to my memory, there was a man who spent his life eluding the concrete woman. He preferred the manual enjoyment of reading, and he effectively congratulated himself every time a knight-errant thoroughly charged one of those sweet female phantoms, made of virtues and overlapping skirts, that await the hero after four hundred pages of exploits, tricks and nonsense. On the threshold of old age, a woman of flesh and blood gave the anchorite a place in her cave. On any pretext she would enter the room and invade it with a strong scent of sweat and wool, of a young peasant girl overheated by the sun. The knight lost his head, but far from catching the one in front of him, he went after, through pages and pages, a pompous product of fantasy. He walked many leagues, speared lambs and windmills, upset some oak trees, and stomped three or four times in the air. When he returned from his fruitless quest, death...

 by Mr Brownlo Alister McGrath's [recent] biography of Lewis sheds interesting information on various aspects of the life of the “creator” of Narnia, and also on his relationship with JRR Tolkien. It seems that Lewis encouraged Tolkien to keep going when the latter was thinking of giving up writing, being unconvinced of the literary value of his efforts.  For his part, Tolkien played an important role in the long process that eventually led Lewis to the Christian faith. Lewis, Tolkien and the concept of mythology. Tolkien argued that Lewis should approach the New Testament with the same imagination and expectation that he brought to the reading of pagan myths in his professional studies. But, as Tolkien emphasized, there was a decisive difference. As Lewis himself stated in [a] letter, “The story of Christ is nothing but a true myth: a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but with the great difference that it really happened.” The reader should understand that ...

Was du geschlagen, Zu Gott wird es dich tragen! I was moved a few months ago by the story of Erik Varden's conversion in his book " La explosión de la soledad " [The Explosion of Solitude] (Monte Carmelo, Fonte, Burgos, 2021).  by Jaime Nubiola What brought him closer to God was the burst of beauty and truth he perceived in Mahler's Symphony No. 2 . Varden explains: "Hearing these words " Have faith: You were not born in vain / You have not suffered in vain ", something burst forth. The pounding insistence, 'not in vain, not in vain,' was irresistible. It wasn't just that I wanted to believe it. I knew it was true. It sounds trite, but at that moment, my consciousness shifted. With a certainty born neither of startled emotion nor cold analysis, I knew I carried something inside me that reached beyond my limits. I was aware of not being alone. There was no special enthusiasm or ecstatic inner movement. There were no tears. But I could no more...

"Georg Friedrich Händel's Messiah, a glorious oratorio that hides a story that deserves to be told. by  Alejandro Sada Every time Christmas time approaches, thousands of people around the world listen once again to the magnificent arias and choruses that make up the most celebrated work of sacred music of all time: Georg Friedrich Handel's Messiah . Underneath this glorious oratorio lies a story that deserves to be told. The great writer Stefan Zweig even considered it to be one of the highlights of human history, one of those moments that set a new course for the world. On 13 April 1737, Händel , exhausted, ill and overburdened with debts, collapsed from an attack of cerebral palsy that caused a stroke on the right side of his body. His condition is so pitiful that the doctor says: "Perhaps we can keep the man. The musician we have lost. However, with the strength of an irrepressible spirit, the composer travels to the hot baths of Aachen, where after six weeks he is...

Christian faith is a great yes to reason at its various levels. In university life, this translates in the first place into a yes to reason as a legitimate human faculty. by Alejandro Sada Laurentius de voltina Does it make sense that confessional universities such as these continue to exist in the 21st century? In order to outline an answer to this question, it is necessary to look at the way in which faith and reason are related. In fact, it was precisely this relationship that led to the development of universities in the Middle Ages. Recently, the great theologian Joseph Ratzinger reminded us that "the university was born because faith considered the search for truth possible and impelled this search in such a way that it subsequently required the extension of its scope to all fields of human knowledge." That is, at the core of Christianity was the conviction that faith can and must be thought and take root in human rationality. It was this conviction that prompted the cr...