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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Act of Mercy

From “Visiting the Sick,” a tutorial by Ariel Scheib:
Visiting the sick  bikur holim) is considered an act of loving kindness (gemilut hasadim). The concept of bikur holim is first introduced in the Bible when God visits Abraham while he is recovering from circumcision (Genesis 18:1). It is from this instant on that Jews are required to emulate God in visiting the sick. Jews are required to visit all who are ill, including gentiles. . . .
Rabbis believe that one who visits the sick takes away a sixtieth of his pain. Continue Reading

Addendum

To paraphrase Degas: There is blogging and there is life; and we have but one heart. In a hurry yesterday, I neglected to say that Bouyer’s The Decomposition of Catholicism is not particularly representative of his writing. It is a brief, highly personal howl of dismay at the results of the Second Vatican Council, in which he himself played a significant role. The polemical energy of it appeals to me but polemics, I know, is not everyone’s cup of Twinings. So perhaps it is a book to meet later, after engaging the tenor of his mind and flavor of his scholarship in his many works on spirituality, the sacraments, the liturgy and Church history. Continue Reading

The Morgan, the Moon, and the Eucharist

I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements. —Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, describing the 1969 moon landing in Guidepost Magazine (October 1970)
The custom of elevating the Host did not become a general practice of the Church until the thirteenth century. Continue Reading

Spelling, Dreams, and Pavel Florensky

. . . a dreamer passes into another, system, another dimension, another measure wherein time is understood and experienced in ways completely unlike the ways of time in the visible world. In this new experience of time, the dreamer’s time, compared to time in the visible world, runs at infinite speed.
—Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis   I am one of those bitter clingers. Among things I cleave to are spelling rules and all that grammar stuff. Communications mavens and editors of Wired can chirp all they like about the glorious way new technologies liberate spelling from the oppressive dogma of fixed rules. Continue Reading

James Franco, Bird S**t, and the Grotesque

The grotesque is one of the most obvious forms art may take to pierce the veil of familiarity, to stab us up from the dross of the accustomed, to make us aware of the perilous paradoxically of life. Robert Penn Warren
So then, how do we approach a performance piece by celebrity artist James Franco called Bird Shit? What kind of malediction is left for a crude, fluffy-minded effort flying under cover of a protected academic category: The Grotesque? Bird Shit lands at the Museum of Modern Art’s satellite PS1 today, April 7th. Continue Reading
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