July 30th, 2007
Lisa Hendey is running a contest during the month of August on her excellent Catholicmom.com website. Broadway Books, publisher of The Book of Jane, has generously donated several copies of the book for Lisa to use as giveaways. To enter, readers just need to drop Lisa an email with “The Book of Jane Contest” [...]
July 27th, 2007
As we wind back into the swing of things, we’ll be focusing most likely on writing up reviews of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival productions we saw for bardolatry. (John’s review of As You Like it—and we did— is already up.)
For now, here’s a lovely little morsel that really takes me back—in this case, to the [...]
July 12th, 2007
Clan Murphy will be AWOL for a week, and with limited internet access, so we won’t even try to post. We’re going to Ashland to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival!
July 10th, 2007
It appears there are petitions circulating, on and off the net, to beg J.K.Rowling not to make Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the last book in the series, or at least the last book in the world she’s created.
I have mixed feelings. I don’t want the series to end any more than any other [...]
July 9th, 2007
One of the great little pleasures of my youth was watching Danny Kaye’s TV variety show every week. (I credit this dear lunatic with introducing me to my first Gilbert & Sullivan patter song—an important moment in any young life!)
I don’t know the origin, but here’s an operatic (ahem) duet Kaye did with the late [...]
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