Egbert's Stone

Before Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, TikToks and AI cat videos, people used to read books. Good books. Classics, they used to be called. They often read them as families, and those families often read them in communities, which provided a degree of social cohesion and (dare I say it?) "mental health" that is simply unfathomable today. One of the books they read was John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Pr...

In the year of our Lord 597, the gospel of Jesus Christ came to the English, and the world has never been the same. People who once practiced human sacrifice were brought to the knowledge of the true and living God. Pagans, who formerly knew only the utterance of barbarity, began to cry the Hebrew 'Alleluia'. The effects of this event would thunder forth for the next 1400 years, bringing into bein...

Written by a Christian poet surveying a not-so-distant pagan past, the 8th-century poem Beowulf presents to our eyes the tragic splendour of the old heathen world. Centering on the figure of Beowulf, this story recounts man’s futile struggle against a dark and hostile age: an age of blood-lust and vengeance, of monsters and ruin. But as it does, it primes our hearts for the arrival of the King who...