Thursday, November 26, 2020

Theology Drop: Michael Di Fuccia on Owen Barfield, the Value of Humility, and Attending to Transcendence

Hi!  Here’s a brief post to say that I've recently discovered a theologian, Michael Di Fuccia, who has some interesting things to say on spirituality, the contemplative life, and spiritual development.   Here he is in a Sept 2020 conversation with Michael (sorry, don’t know his last name) from a YouTube channel called The Meaning Code.  It’s a dense and far-ranging conversation.  If you only can give a few minutes, pick it up at 103:10 until about 1:09.  Michael Di Fuccia talks about how, if we want to attend to transcendence and be instructed to it, then that posture will entail a fair degree of humility.    That’s a stance that I think we could all take more consistently on our social media platforms.



Michael Di Fuccia was a student of the Anglican theologian John Millbank (co-founder of the Radical Orthodox movement), and has recently published a book on Owen Barfield, who travelled in the same Oxford circles as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.      Barfield is not someone who was on my radar screen - he is briefly mentioned in Humphrey Carpenter’s book The Inklings (1978) as a student of Coleridge and of a German early 20th century spiritual and philosophical movement called Anthroposophy.  You can find some of Barfield’s writings here.

Di Fuccia is also associated with The Martin Institute, an organization inspired by the Christian writer Dallas Willard and dedicated to spiritual formation; it hosts an interesting site called Conversatio Divina: A Centre for Spiritual Renewal.  

On that site you can find a resource called 12 Spiritual Practices For A Pandemic, which looks fascinating - I’ve bookmarked for further study.

I pray that this is helpful and that God goes with you today.

Cheers and blessings,

Michael

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