2013

Newman Himself (& Von Speyr on Newman)

With the morn, those angel faces smile which I have loved long since and lost awhile . —John Henry Newman Notes of condolence are among of the hardest things of all to write. They are obliged to console. Consolation is their raison d’etre. Yet how is that accomplished? What can be said at the moment grief demands its due without falling into maudlin cliché? Anguish seems better left with silence. Yet silence is cruel, a retreat from the one who grieves and an abandonment of the dead. Continue Reading
In Morte Sumus

I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write: From henceforth blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. —Book of Common Prayer Can we stay awhile with death? This is November, month of the Holy Souls. Poor Souls, in the wording of my childhood. It is the season to remember that “in the midst of life, we are in death.” The Church gives us a full month to consider what the culture around us strains to obscure. Let us not rush. Continue Reading
All Hallow's Eve

It cannot be said that a man endures death easily or uneasily when he does not think about it at all. He who feels nothing, endures nothing. —Voltaire
When did I stop liking Halloween? Was it when parents horned in and started dressing up along with their kids? When the previous director of my town library celebrated Hallowmas by showing up in drag? [Honest. He did.] When all the local merchants turned shop windows over to middle schoolers to paint—in washable gouache—ghosts, witches and tombstones that go BOO? Continue Reading
The Conversion of Artists?

The website of the Catholic Artists Society offers an audio download of its sponsored lectures. In return, it asks only for the courtesy of a small voluntary donation. When I went to the site after Gregory Wolfe’s talk, there was an addendum to the donation button. If you preferred prayer to cash, you could make good by saying a decade of the Rosary for the conversion of artists. That codicil is now gone, thank goodness. The conversion of artists. Given the unlovely, preparatory landfill turned out in carloads by MFA programs, it might have seemed a humane objective. Continue Reading
Beauty, the Mantra

Beauty will save the world—a mantra among contemporary Christians issuing from the mouth of a character in nineteenth century Russian fiction. Augustine’s Beauty has already saved the world. Our ransom has been paid. What matters now is whether the world cooperates with its redemption or flouts it. History will tell in the end. The arts of the beautiful are weightless in the balance. They can only scratch at the surface—if that—of moral beauty. But moral beauty is not the artist’s province. Continue Reading