To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose a person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best In 1875, Hopkins was studying theology and trying to abstain from poetry. Reading the account in The Times of the wreck of the Deutschland and the death of the exiled German nuns stunned him, explosively unlocking his creative talent.First, he saw in the event a powerful mirror image of his own conversion encounter with God. Second, his passionate lyrical sense of the transience of beauty was at once furnished with a huge array of striking metaphors. Third, his commitment to the paradoxes of theology (Trinity, Incarnation, the crucified and risen Christ) was given an urgency that brought it wholly to