April 27th, 2007
Along with “Put money in thy purse!” the following two items nicely fit into the new posting category we’ve added to The Idyllist, “Arts Community”. As things like this cross our desks, we’ll pass them on to y’all in the Christian writers and arts community.
First, The Trinity Arts Conference is sponsoring its multidsciplary conference on [...]
December 20th, 2006
Check out this very perceptive op ed piece by Bill Barnwell, a Michigan pastor. Here’s a taste:
Much of the problem is that many Christians are told that the arts are evil and need to be avoided. I know that on a mass cultural level, however, that a gifted Christian artist can reach far, far, more [...]
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…’
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Kelly Hatzenbihler on 