I’m pleased to have received an appraisal of the latest issue of the St. Austin Review from Father Peter Milward, the celebrated Shakespeare scholar. It is always gratifying to receive an emphatic thumbs-up from scholars of Father Milward’s stature. Here is the text of his e-mail:

Once again many thanks for the latest issue of StAR. Here are (as usual) a few comments of mine.

a. Your opening essay is right on target. The secular fundamentalists are indeed trying to expel religion from public life, without realizing that they themselves are an atheistic religion. Only I would trace it all back not just to the French Revolution but to Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. They were the original secularists, together with Machiavelli (and Luther).

b. I like your paradox, that the evolutionists are observing intelligent design in trying to refute intelligent design. The great champion of intelligent design was, of course, St Thomas Aquinas.

c. I admired Thomas Storck’s article on Dawson and Belloc, whose ideas are always at the back of my mind on the subject of faith and culture.

d. As Fr Kiely puts it, the preacher, like the prophet, has the duty not only to comfort the afflicted but also to afflict the comfortable.

e. In response to DT Davies, I can assure him that it is common knowledge among English Jesuits that King Edward VII was indeed received into the Church on his death-bed by his good friend, the Jesuit Bernard Vaughan – just as King Charles II is known to have been received into the Church on his death-bed by the Benedictine John Hudleston.

With best wishes and prayers, Peter SJ