Among the more unnerving aspects of contemporary culture is the accelerating pretense of art to the aims, methods, and achievements of science. Call it art in drag, art in the costume of systematized knowledge, gained through observation and experiment, of the material world and its social structures. Art as counterfeit science, more accurately, as complement and accomplice to it, is proudly on show in the University of Buffalo’s current call for applicants to its PhD program in Media Study. The work below illustrates the program: Marc Bohlen’s construction is the visual correlative of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, science fiction brought up to date . Continue Reading

El Greco, Messiah of Modernism

Maureen Mullarkey

November 18, 2013

Among Platonists, man is mind, intellect, above all else. Man is ordained to think. His province is learning and true wisdom. The rest is flesh and appetite, or, in the phrasing of Timaeus , an Eros of begetting. A common, ignoble thing that resides in the lower precincts of the body and pulls us earthenward, away from our celestial affinity. Christopher Johnson, in the comment section to the previous post, alludes to that ancient polarity. Speaking of El Greco’s St. Martin and the Beggar, he notes that the painting transports the scene from a mere act of charity to an encounter between the mortal and the divine. Continue Reading

Half a Cloak

Maureen Mullarkey

November 11, 2013

Today is Veterans Day. It is also the feast day of St. Martin of Tours, patron of soldiers. Martin is my patron saint as well. Back in second grade, when we were asked to pick a saint’s name for Confirmation, I chose Martin. There followed a brief flurry of canonical concern.buy Cymbalta online medstaff.englewoodhealth.org/wp-content/languages/new/ no prescription Was it suitable for a girl to take a male saint’s name? Could she do it? Should she? I was not trying to create a nuisance. Continue Reading

Newman Himself (& Von Speyr on Newman)

Maureen Mullarkey

November 7, 2013

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

Maureen Mullarkey

November 4, 2013

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

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Art, Science, and Soma

El Greco, Messiah of Modernism

Half a Cloak

Newman Himself (& Von Speyr on Newman)

In Morte Sumus

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