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Sistine & Porsche
Your friends are not religious; they are only pew-renters. They are not moral; they are only conventional. Don Juan to the Devil in Shaw’s Man...
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Beauty Bits & Pieces
A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology....
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Where Did Ash Wednesday Go?
What has happened to Ash Wednesday? Is the wearing of ashes in decline everywhere? Or only in New York City, a sanctuary city for people of every faith or unfaith? Or was I just in the wrong part of...
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Leonardo Boff & Backdoor Polytheism
What made Christianity so dangerous [to imperial Rome] was its uncompromising, radical de-divinization of the world. Eric Voegelin, The New Science...
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This morning’s broadcast from Sandro Magister lists the names of our twenty-one new Coptic saints. The essay “Saint Milad Saber and His Twenty Companions” can be read in full here. But let me list...
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Art Be With You
There can be no question that it [religion] has lost the organic relations with culture which it possessed in the great religion-cultures of antiquity and the Middle Ages....
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The Soma of Art & Sex Ed
Children were lifting their tunics for each other before pants ever existed. You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine. It is an ancient dare, a forbidden game, played behind bushes, in stairwells, or...
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No Pollution & No Purity
The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork. William Burroughs, Introduction to The...
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Penny for Thought
You would not pass a dollar bill on the sidewalk without picking it up. Maybe not even a quarter. I am sure of that. But a penny? Do you stoop for that? I do. Thomas Rowlandson. Two-a-penny Buns...
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Art for Selfies
. . . millions of Americans now regularly eat French-fried potatoes with their fingers. We have sunk, anthropologically speaking, beneath the level of the fork. The daily, unrecorded habits of a...
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Guardini’s Mob
For all the anecdotes recorded in the Passion chronicle, there seems a lacuna at the heart of it. Something goes missing. Something in the text lacks explication. The politics of it are plain enough....
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RFRA & My Wedding Ring
It has been some time since I gave thought to the day my soon-to-be husband and I bought our wedding rings. But the spectacle over RFRAall the panting hysteria of a predatory media and toadying...
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Notes On An Idol
The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of...
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Iconography of Power
Propaganda posters are a fascinating genre in their own right. Early Soviet posters are graphically compelling, and among my favorite works of art. It is a topic to come back to on a later date. But...
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The Toxic Legacy of Rachel Carson
. . . the fraudulence of Silent Spring goes beyond mere cherry-picking or discredited data: Carson abused, twisted, and distorted many of the studies that she cited, in a brazen act of scientific...
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Church, Zero; Zeitgeist, Two
A few days before the last of the Vatican’s three climate workshops, the Italian parliament sped up the divorce process. The new law cuts the time Italians have to wait for a divorce: from three years...
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Through the Eyes of Lu Nan
Publicity is meaningless for an artist. If the pictures are good, it doesn’t matter who took them, and if the pictures are not good, it also doesn’t matter who took them....
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To The Point With Aesop
Those old sayings stay with us for good reason. Our bones absorb them in childhood; we can never outgrow them. Later, as adults, we find ourselves forever surprised by the truth of them. No small part...
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Raking A Grave
I raked a grave last evening. It was twilight when I got there. Little time was left to work. It was just enough. The race against sunset and total darkness was a welcome distraction from the ache of...
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Trans-Fixed For Sure
Decadence was brought about by . . . the surfeit of fine art and the love of the bizarre. Voltaire (1748)Chris Burden died last month, close to...
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