Hello there. This is Mark Bowerline with another conversation. Before we get to it, a word about one of our sponsors.

Located in the foothills of Wyoming's spectacular wind river range, Wyoming Catholic College, an

accredited four-year Great Books Institution, is built on the ancient Western tradition of the

liberal arts and the freedom of the American West. The college offers its students an

immersion in the primary sources of the classical tradition, the grandeur of the mountain wilderness,

and the spiritual heritage of the Catholic Church. Students experience the illumination of imagination and intellect through the great books and traditional disciplines,

literature and philosophy, mathematics and theology, science and Latin, and an outdoor program second to none.

The college celebrated an in-person graduation with its seniors last year and welcomed its

largest freshman class ever this year. Learn more about the college's unique

space in the world of American higher education at Wyoming Catholic.edu.

Holly Ordway is Cardinal Francis George fellow at Word on Fire Institute and

visiting professor of apologetics at Houston Christian University.

She's the co-author, I'm sorry, she's the author of Tolkien's Modern Reading, Middle Earth Beyond the Middle Ages,

and Tales of Faith, a guide to sharing the gospel through literature. She has edited a new volume for

Word on Fire Press entitled, As Kingfisher's Catch Fire, Selected and Annotated Poems of Gerard Manley

Hopkins. That's our topic today. Welcome, Professor Ordway. Oh, lovely to be on. Thank you.

Now, oh, you know basic questions uh let's get to the biography uh who was this guy hopkins well he was a uh he was a Victorian um and a

Jesuit um so he was a poet priest father ger Gerard Manley Hopkins, and also a convert.

He was in fact received into the church by St. John Henry Newman.

So it's an interesting sort of Newmanian connection.

He went to Oxford University and from an Anglican family and entered the church at a time when this was very much not a socially acceptable thing to do

and definitely paid a price for that with his family from whom he was estranged for a long time,

...