News reached us this weekend of the death of our dear friend Max Richards. He died as a result of head injuries sustained after being hit by a car on Wednesday morning, while walking his dog Pink in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle. To attend to the shock of this terrible news I have been re-reading many of his recent emails and posts, in order to hear his voice and sit with his steadying patterns of thought. In particular I have spent time thinking about Max’s long interest in religion, of faith lost or found. He gave a paper at the Carmelite Library in the last couple of years on this subject, as expressed in Victorian poetry. The last book recommendation he gave on Facebook was ‘Absence of Mind : the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self’, a set of lectures given at Yale by Marilynne Robinson, that takes to task the way secularists wish to displace religion with science. Her book is withering in its dismissal of the attitude that we can ...