Last week we lingered at Oxford — that season of innocence when friendship, laughter, and beauty seemed sufficient for a lifetime. This week, Evelyn Waugh moves us forward, gently but decisively, into Stage III — Brideshead & First Love. Oxford was a garden of youth. Brideshead is something else entirely. Here, Charles Ryder encounters beauty on a larger scale — not merely aesthetic pleasure, but a place that awakens longing, attachment, and a sense of destiny. Long be

First published in 1945, Brideshead Revisited is the most explicitly Christian novel by Evelyn Waugh, and one of the great religious novels of the twentieth century. Written at the end of World War II, it is a work of remembrance—of youth, of England, of beauty—but more deeply, of grace.

We dressed up in top hats, wore scrafts and carried candles when we caroled in the 1950s. I loved it then the singing, the carols, and hot chocolate and warm fellowship We like to go to the Old People's Home in Elizabeth to sing to the shutins, Now the young carolers come to sing for me and the other old timers at Riverside Presbyterian House. I think I enjoy it more now than then, the Joy of Christmas and the Love of Jesus still shines.

In the winter of 1741, George Frideric Handel was a broken man. Once celebrated, now deeply in debt, physically weakened, and emotionally exhausted, he faced public failure and private despair. Some believed his best work was behind him. Others thought he was finished. Then a libretto arrived — not a play, not an opera, not a story of kings or lovers — but pure Scripture. You know the rest.. It was not written to entertain.It was written to proclaim.