Culture Cues

Relics: Lives and Legends

Fra Filippo’s resplendent Madonna della Cintola, in the previous post, sent me to a favorite passage in The Waning of the Middle Ages. Johan Huizinga‘s portrait of the linchpins of the medieval world—the ideas that bound together religion, art, and literature—has a few things to say about relics. The significance of them to the culture that embraced them is an integral part of medieval civilization.
The distinctly corporeal conception of the saints was accentuated by the veneration of their relics, not only permitted by the Church but forming an integral part of religion.
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Lilippo Lippi painting of the death of St. Stephen

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Nothing salutes the historian’s task more cogently than that lapidary first sentence of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go Between. In fairness to Filippo Lippi, there is more to say. And the honor of history demands it—not to clear a path through the thicket of present concerns or to shake a finger at either past or present. But simply to understand our world without—as best we can—an ulterior motive. Despite Vasari’s known bent for embellishment, his spirited account of Fra Filippo’s elopement with Lucrezia Buti has been accepted in its essentials. Continue Reading
Toppled Statues, Romantic Primitivism & Cultures Against Civilization

Cultures proliferate. But as Roger Scruton reminded us, the thing called civilization is something altogether different. It is a commanding inheritance—a dynamic, comprehensive order that defends against dissolution into bedlam. The peril of our historical moment lies in the denigration of civilization by a multiplicity of parochial cultures. From feminism, gay culture, LBGTQ+ Nation (with its own flag), and transgenderism, to aggressive assertions of racial and ethnic primacy, we are re-tribalizing. Passion for multiculturalism is little more than an inversion of the barbarian’s jealous hatred for civilization. Continue Reading
Archbishop Cordileone: Dancing With Restorative Justice

“The Archbishop is on fire to defend the faith!” So began Maggie Gallagher’s June 3rd broadcast email touting Archbishop Cordileone’s “stinging rebuke” to Marin County’s DA for having dropped felony charges against vandals on the grounds of Mission San Rafael. As executive director of the Benedict XVI Institute in San Francisco, Ms. Gallagher publicizes the activities of the institute. She also promotes the public persona of the archbishop, advisor-in-chief on the institute’s board. Acting as publicist, her first objective is a spring board for the second. Continue Reading
Earth Day: Compost & Microbiome Extinction

Today is Earth Day. This annual feast of eco-spirituality has been with us for a half century. It gains more converts every year. Its official patron saint is Gaylord Nelson, then-senator from Wisconsin. He stirred crowds on the first Earth Day with calls for new national policies that will “interfere with what many have considered their right to use and abuse the air, the water, the land.”
Campaign nationwide to elect an “Ecology Congress” as the 92nd Congress – a Congress that will build bridges between our citizens and between man and nature’s systems, instead of building more highways and dams and new weapons systems .
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