Sex education was simpler when I was a girl. There were only two sexes back then. And the word gender had not yet leaped from the declension of nouns to an identity. Sr. Edmund Marie, the biology teacher in the girls’ department of our parish high school, visited the grammar school every year. She spent a day talking to seventh graders (or was it sixth?) about the biology of plants, and brought with her a black portfolio of over-sized botanical posters. Continue Reading

A Personal Note On Pride Month

Maureen Mullarkey

July 10, 2024

While the holy month of Pride was upon us, I thought often of the ancient Dance of Death. Through the 1990s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, a parade saluting sexual behaviors that shortened lives struck me as a celebration against itself—an inverted Danse Macabre. What once had been cautionary and didactic was becoming exhortative. The parade was encouraging if not, in a perverse way, edifying. A certain kind of free spiritedness, however lethal, was assumed to be tinged with heroism. Continue Reading

Studio Matters: Art Talk, Church Talk, et al.

Maureen Mullarkey

June 21, 2024

Studio Matters began as a companion to my columns for the culture desk of The New York Sun in its brief reincarnation as a print edition. I often miss my weblog’s original mandate. At the time, The Sun ran the best arts coverage in New York City. A small troupe of us covered visual arts for the culture desk under the heading “Gallery Going.” Journalistic art criticism has been with us since the Mercure de France published the first criticism of a Paris Salon in 1738. Continue Reading

Francis, the Venice Biennale, and the Vacuum of Belief

Maureen Mullarkey

May 5, 2024

Francis is the first pope to tour the Venice Biennale. May he be the last. A good deal of sugar has been spun from the unexamined conceit that art—Art—is a moral pill to treat social problems. A trademark of upper-middle and upper-upper class groupthink, it was in high relief on Sunday, April 28. That day Pope Francis helicoptered to Venice for a tour of the exhibition “With My Eyes” at the Holy See Pavilion. The word pavilion here is a moveable concept that applies to a temporary installation housed this year in the women’s prison on Venice’s Giudecca Island. Continue Reading

Fernandez & Pizzaballa: Soft Porn v. Hardcore

Maureen Mullarkey

January 15, 2024

In every age, the levers of power are worked with equal ambition by Church and state. Members of both assemblies inhabit the moral imagination of their time; both breathe the same compromised air. Self-justified worthies gerrymander realities without apology. They confer high awards on finesse in dissembling. Language obfuscates; clarity is penalized. Two contemporary parallels come to mind, one ecclesial, the other secular. During the COVID-19 panic, the CDC gave the word vaccine a makeover. It tweaked language in order to sell the public on an inadequately tested gene therapy being used as if it were a vaccine in the traditional sense that Edward Jenner might recognize. Continue Reading