Culture Cues

A Cabinet of Vanities

Among liturgically concerned responses to the previous post, one of them gave me a start:
On Corpus Christi, at a Manhattan parish, we had to sing an entrance song which begins, “We are here to tell our story, We are here to break the bread, we are here to know our rising from the dead . . . ”
Here to tell our story . The Gospel of Me. The all-encompassing Cosmic Me. The lyrics lend new meaning to the adjective catholic , do they not? Continue Reading
Beauty: Fragment on a Theme

I am neither a theologian nor a philosopher. I am simply a painter whose faith takes color, tone, and bearing from the Catholicism into which I was born. But even a cat can look at a king. From my place—well beneath the box seats of beauty-minded theologians and theological esthetes—I wonder if Hans Urs von Balthasar’s legacy is as wholly salutary as it has become fashionable to believe. This is a risky confession, my brothers and my sisters. I know that. Continue Reading
On Keeping Powder Dry

“Woe to me if I do not evangelize” 1 Cor 9:16   You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em Know when to fold ‘em Know when to walk away know when to run You never count your money When you’re sittin’ at the table There’ll be time enough for countin’ When the dealin’s done. Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler “(1978)   Two thousand years apart, the verses complement each other. St.Paul was a canny evangelist. He knew when to fold (on circumcision and table laws) and when to hold his ground. Continue Reading
Bloodless/Bloodied

Blood is either absent or decorously minimized in those images of Jesus’ Passion with which we are best familiar. The death of Jesus is only part of the Christ story; the momentous, history-shattering disclosure comes later. Accordingly, traditional Passion imagery inclines toward a reflective distance from the physical realities of a Roman scourging and crucifixion. In the earliest crucifixes, the corpus is dressed in an ecclesiastical tunic and its outstretched arms do not bend with the weight of the body. Straight and firm as they are, the outstretched arms suggests either a welcoming embrace or triumphal acclaim—the exuberant gesture of a victory lap. Continue Reading
Beckmann's Deposition, a Modernist Offering

We who live in the Western world at the present time continue to suffer under the reign of a great tyranny — the tyranny of artistic modernism. New English Review , August 2012
  It gets tiring, this lingering need to swipe at modernism. To the extent a date applies, the waning of modernism hovers between the late 1930s and the end of the Second World War. Yet seven decades later, one Quixote or another still gallops forward to tilt at the carcass. Continue Reading