April 16th, 2008
Idylls Press illustrator and book designer John Murphy has copped the enviable job of flying to Washington D.C. and New York this week to blog for GodSpy on Pope Benedict’s visit to America. John’s first post, America: Encounter the Pope can be read here. His latest posts will appear on the GodSpy front page.
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 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 [...]
December 11th, 2007
As many Idyllist readers know, Our Lady of Guadalupe figures prominently in my novel, The Mystery of Things. Well, here’s a little factoid from the Catholic news agency, Zenit, which made even my jaw drop:
MEXICO CITY, DEC. 11, 2007 - Leaders at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, which houses St. [...]
November 4th, 2007
“To regret religion is to regret Western civilization” — that’s the thesis of an insightful and eloquent essay by Theodore Dalrymple, a physician and non-believer. He politely takes the “New Atheists” (Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et. al) to task for their shrill militancy, “bad temper,” and general lack of civility or common decency [...]
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