Darren Lorente-Bull

With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event. — Cardinal John Newman The Sacramental  Vision is acquired, according to the Catholic Church when one is capable of seeing evidence of the divine in the world around us. This runs contrary to Gnosticism and encourages us to find the Self in Creation, to seek kinship with God and the rest of His Creation.  Before the 20th century and the fragmentation of the Self and the "murder" of God,   prior to the development of vast urban, industrialised areas, man was in contact with nature and in synch with the seasons. Today we stare at screens and ignore the names of the flowers and plants that grow in parks and gardens. Or many of us do, anyhow. A Sacramental Vision is a distinctive Catholic idea which asks that we see the world like stanzas in a poem, as Cardinal Newman suggests in the opening q...

In his treatise 'A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', written in 1843, Marx states the following: The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religio...