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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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For Unto Us A Child Is Born

EACH CHRISTMAS MORNING I wake up relieved that the struggle against “Happy Holidays” is over for another year. Holidays are holy days, after all. When Hanukkah and Christmas arrive so close together as they do this year, I wonder if it would be possible to announce “Happy Holy Days!” into the secular void.  The wondering calls to mind “A Rabbi’s Christmas,” an essay by one Jakob Petuchowski. When it was written 20 years ago, the author was a professor of Judeo-Christian studies in Cincinnati, of Jewish liturgy in Arizona, and a rabbi in Laredo, Texas. Continue Reading

That Beleaguered Cross Again

JUDGING FROM EMAIL RESPONSES, the accidental cross-shaped form left standing at Ground Zero rouses great ire. All my mail has been sympathetic to the lawsuit against it on the grounds that the cross is not a secular symbol. (I never said it was. I said it resonated beyond sectarian distinctions. Quite a different thought.) It was erected “by CHRISTIANS,” one reader screeched. Some of the mail considers wariness toward Islam “defamatory” and, in the main, just plain not nice. For clarity’s sake, let me take these one at a time, beginning with the (Christian) origins of America’s enthusiastic sectarian religiosity. Continue Reading

The Cross at Ground Zero

ATHEISTS ADMIT THAT ATHEISM IS A BELIEF SYSTEM. It is about time. Atheism is as much a faith-based system as any God-centered religion. The existence of God can neither be proven nor unproven, no matter all the effort expended on debate. Unbelievers assert their own beliefs as ardently as any church-goer. That is the single, dominant thread running through the law suit, filed by pious atheists, against the cross to be raised at Ground Zero. The cross, an accidental formation of steel beams left standing in the 9/11 rubble, is intended for display in the proposed 9/11 Memorial Museum designed for the site.   // NBC covers the suit briefly here:
“This cross is now a part of the official WTC memorial.
Continue Reading

The Art of Punishment?

ONCE RADICAL EVIL SHRINKS TO PSYCHOLOGICAL PROPORTIONS, society’s ability to inflict hardship—including the psychological pain of deep remorse—diminishes. Restitution and rehabilitation become one and the same thing.  That pulls the rug out from under an artist’s capacity to conceive anything close to the grand hellscapes, sublime in their gravity, that came freely to Hieronymous Bosch. When intuitions of the demonic are disarmed and superceded by a therapeutic culture, what images are left to draw upon? Bosch lived in age that made this plausible: // // Contemporary Norway appears to have progressed to, even surpassed, this: // What brought Bosch to mind—more precisely, the contemporary impossibility of his hellscapes—is the post that appeared on the blog of Foreign Policy: “The Not-So-Terrible Fate of Norway’s Alleged Killer.” Continue Reading
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