August 7th, 2006
I’ll be posting very little if at all the next several weeks, in part because I’ll be taking some vacation time here and there, and in part because we’re busy putting the final touches on the books we’re publishing in October: Maureen McQuerry’s Young Adult fantasy Wolfproof and Farrell O’Gorman’s adult literary novel Awaiting Orders. [...]
Debra Murphy on Reviving Christianity’s Artistic Tradition
Kelly Hatzenbihler on Reviving Christianity’s Artistic Tradition
Rach on Nessun Dorma, As You’ve Never Heard it Before
Kathleen Lundquist on Reviving Christianity’s Artistic Tradition Debra Murphy on Reviving Christianity’s Artistic Tradition
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Joan of Arc: A Life (Penguin Lives) by Mary Gordon
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Those were the days [the nineteenth century] of the great schism between the artist and Catholicism when it seemed that art and sanctity must be forever separated. One thinks of the convert J.K. Huysmans standing among the crowd of pious pilgrims at Lourdes, his soul harassed by the observation that, although Mary had chased the devil from the rocks of the shrine and the hearts of the pilgrims, he was still there blaspheming her and her Son by the ‘hideous’ architecture of the place. He distinctly hears the devil say to Mary: ‘I shall dog your footsteps, and wherever you stop, there I shall establish myself; you may have at Lourdes all the priests you please, but art, which is the only worth-while thing on earth after sanctity, not only will you not have, but I shall so effect that it will unceasingly insult you by the prolonged blasphemy of its uglinesss….All that represents you and your Son will be grotesque…’
— Calvert Alexander, SJ