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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Sistine & Porsche – A Marriage of Brands

Your friends are not religious; they are only pew-renters. They are not moral; they are only conventional. Don Juan to the Devil in Shaw’s Man and Superman A sense of the holy brings with it a sense of taboo. We tread cautiously in the tenting place of the ineffable. A Presence abides. We dare not […]

The Sistine Hall of the Vat

Beauty, Balthasar, & Boilers

Beauty is my business as thoroughly as trouble is Raymond Chandler’s. Still, you will never catch me talking about “the beautiful.” I have no idea what it is or what it might look like. A transcendental is a bit like a virtual “friend”—you never get to see it. In the lived life, beauty is sensible. […]

Elie Nadleman sculpture

Remembering Jacques Ellul

We do live in history, and this age is hard to bear. Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment To be of one’s time means to attend to the nature of the times. It means resisting the siren call of the day’s enthusiasms—zeal for environmentalism, sustainability, multiculturalism, global fixes, et alia—in order to stay mindful […]

Francis & Political Illusion

There is a great temptation today to confuse sociological evolution with spiritual progress, and Christians are the first to succumb to that temptation. Nevertheless, the Bible expressly tells us that the history of mankind ends in judgment. It does not give place to the Kingdom. Jacques Ellul, False Presence of the Kingdom Conformity to the […]

E.T.A. Hoffmann, Enchanter

With liturgical regularity, Christmastide brings the magic of The Nutcracker. This is the perfect season for it. By December, the year’s worth of adult disdain for all things enchanted has reached a crescendo. “No, Virginia, you’ve been had,” galumph uncomprehending gradgrinds who dismiss fantasy as lying. Childhood’s sensitivity to wonder is put to the test this […]

illustration for The Nutcracker by Gannady Spirin

Consider Toy Soldiers

Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books. Full title of H.G. Wells’ 1913 rule book for playing with tin soldiers Old toy soldiers were a fixture in the local bookshop window when […]

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