The activity of the Thomas More Centre in the online space is picking up! Two interviews – one with Alex Dee and the other with Larry Chapp – have been posted to our YouTube channel, while three more interviews are due to be posted over the next three weeks. These will be with Kees de Groot (on the Catholic roots of Tintin), Daniel Mitsui (acclaimed artist) and Alan Harrelson (pipe smoking enthusiast and historian of the American South).

Kees de Groot is a professor in the Tilburg School of Catholic Theology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. A lover of the comic hero Tintin, he has published articles detailing the religious outlook of Hergé, Tintin’s creator.

Alex Dee is a co-founder of the ‘Saints Alive’ podcast, a high-quality radio drama which has so far documented the lives of 36 saints. Each episode employs roughly 20 voice actors and takes approximately 300 hours to complete. Presently, he is also recording episodes to do with Lent, Eucharistic miracles, and the Easter Triduum. And thanks to our interview, St Mary Mackillop is now on his radar. If, or perhaps we should say when, this episode is to be made, Alex will need Australian voice actors – so stay tuned! You can check out their content here.

Larry Chapp is a former theology professor turned Catholic worker who, with his wife Carrie, owns and manages the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. In addition to working other jobs to support themselves (Larry regularly pens pieces for The Catholic World Report and other publications), they give the produce of their farm to the poor and welcome people with Benedictine hospitality. In the interview, he talks about his motivation for moving to the land and about the Catholic Worker Movement more generally. Larry blogs at gaudiumetspes22.com.

If either of these interviews (or those upcoming) are of interest to you, please check them out. Please always try to like and share our content (the algorithm then spreads it more widely), and subscribe if you’d like to catch future episodes.

What's On

In other news, our very own Nicole Yap will be giving a talk at the Indooroopilly Library in Brisbane on Thursday, March 14 entitled “Beauty and the Modern Beast: Recovering Beauty in an Age of Ugliness”. As usual, drinks and nibbles are from 6pm, with optional dinner/drinks at the Pig ‘n’ Whistle afterwards.

Also, the Thomas More Centre hub in Albury, NSW will be holding an Autumn School on April 19 and 20 on "Truth and Beauty of the Human Person and Vocations", for anyone 18 years or over. It will be the first of the TMC's 21st-century “schools” since the highly regarded summer schools of the 2000s. Key speakers include clergy of the Wagga Wagga diocese - Fr Peter Murphy, Fr Sean Byrnes and Fr Bradley Rafter - as well as Anthony Gordon, Anna Krohn & Stina Constantine. Early bird price is $130 if you book by Sunday, March 31.

More updates to come!

Mark Makowiecki
Queensland Organiser
Thomas More Centre