January 18th, 2008
If you’re like me, you welcome a wider use of the gorgeous Tridentine liturgy. Surrounded by the beauty of language, gesture and music demanded by the old rite, it makes (at least for me) much easier to lift mind and heart to the Divine.
But there was one aspect to the old rite that always made [...]
January 14th, 2008
Clan Murphy/Idylls Press has a personal and immediate interest in the current “mortgage crisis”: we’re trying to sell our lovely old 1915 Craftsman house so we can complete our relocation to Ashland, OR. (Dan is already down there–Ashland is 200 miles south of our present home in Salem–and the double-rent/weekend commute is getting s-p-e-n-d-y. Salem’s [...]
January 13th, 2008
John has posted new reviews on both Catholic Fiction and Bardolatry…
Respectively, Mauriac’s Viper’s Tangle and Branagh’s HBO film of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
January 13th, 2008
Jane Austen fans of the world, unite!
The Beeb (in conjunction with its US partner, PBS), has begun broadcasting a something new/something old series of Jane Austen TV adaptations. Tonight, Sunday, January 13, opens with a new production of Jane’s Persuasion. (And if you don’t catch it on Sunday night, most PBS stations broadcast a [...]
January 2nd, 2008
A lucid dismantling of Christopher Hitchens’ anti-theist screed, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, appeared in the summer issue of the The Claremont Review of Books. Written by Atlantic Monthly contributing editor, Ross Douthat, the essay picks apart Hitchens “anecdotal” arguments, and concludes that
the reader will come away unpersuaded of anything save the [...]
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