Learning to See
From the philosopher Josef Pieper, in his great little book Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation, a gift to me from The Covenant School: Man’s ability to see is in decline. Those who nowadays...
View ArticleHow to Make a God Movie
Alissa Wilkinson, the chief film critic for Christianity Today, pens a smart piece for The Atlantic about bad God movies and good God movies. She points out that there really are some fine films with...
View ArticleWalker Percy: Springsteen Fanboy
Here’s a terrific find: an exchange of letters between Walker Percy and Bruce Springsteen. In 1989, Percy wrote to Springsteen after having been introduced to Springsteen’s music by his (Percy’s)...
View ArticleThe Impossibility of Perfect Justice
Last night, there was a passionate parish council meeting here in West Feliciana. In 2012, our parish (that is, county) voted to do away with our traditional system of government, the “police jury”...
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Church as Holy Cave
Gregory Wolfe, editor of the arts and faith quarterly Image Journal, has just published The Operation of Grace, a new collection of his essays on, well, art and faith. The first one is called “The...
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The Art $800 Million Would Buy
View from my desk this afternoo Everybody loves to think about how they would spend a lottery jackpot. If I won the $800 million jackpot this weekend, I would buy an apartment in Paris, build a church...
View ArticleSJW Art Commissars
A reader sent in this depressing account of an art squabble on the campus of one of California’s prestigious Claremont colleges. Seems that Selena Spier, an undergraduate, painted on a dorm wall a...
View ArticleGrowing Up With Sensual Religion
Last night we had one of the longest services of the year in the Orthodox Church: the ritualized Holy Thursday reading of these 12 Passion narratives from the Gospels. It takes about three hours, with...
View ArticleBrokeback Mountain, Hamilton, Art
I know we’re all Hamiltoned out, but please, allow me another word about Hamilton and the power of art to open our eyes to things we would not otherwise have seen. Back in 2005, I was a columnist at...
View ArticleMulticulturalism And Modernity
Reader Anna, who lives in Budapest, recommended to me the 1994 Macedonian film Before The Rain. It’s not available on Netflix or Amazon Prime streaming, but she found a version on YouTube subtitled in...
View Article‘Destroy That Art!’ Cried The Woke Artists
In the current Whitney Biennial, a very big-deal art show in New York, there is a 2016 painting depicting the body of Emmett Till, the Mississippi teenager murdered by white supremacists in 1955....
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A Tale Of Two Photos
If you read the New Yorker profile of me, you saw that this photo (by Maude Schuyler Clay) is the one they chose to illustrate it: Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay, for the New Yorker Maude Schuyler Clay...
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The Story Of God
Apse mosaic in the 6th century Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna. Notice the beardless Christ in the center (Samot/Shutterstock) Via The Browser, here is a link to Tyler Cowen’s hourlong conversation...
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Eyes That Watch For God
Serg Zastavkin/Shutterstock In 2002, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, gave a speech about beauty and God. Excerpts: Being struck and overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more real,...
View ArticleThe Terrible Snow Falling In The Temple
A friend who teaches in a college just sent me this beautiful elegy, and gives me permission to publish it here: This morning I was walking across campus and I saw, under the hickories and catalpas...
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