What do you expect, really, from Hollywood? No, I have not seen the movie, but this reviewer, Barbara Nicolosi, writing for Patheos website has seen it. And, reading her review, one can see that she is obviously an experienced and … Continue reading
Category: Arts and Culture
Portland Archbishop Alexander K. Sample on the Traditional Mass
On March 1, 2014 Archbishop Alexander Sample of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon celebrated a Pontifical High Mass in the Extraordinary Form at the Brigittine Monastery “Our Lady of Consolation” in Amity, Oregon. The Mass was the crowning celebration … Continue reading
Dr. Anthony Esolen on How Common Core Devalues Great Literature
(Crisis Magazine) The Common Corers get things exactly backwards. You do not read The Wind in the Willows so that you can gain some utilitarian skill for handling “text.” If anything, we want our children to gain a little bit … Continue reading
Saint Agatha’s Breasts
Father Leonard Feeney once remarked that certain Puritan sectaries refuse to pray the Hail Mary because the Catholic prayer has a bad word in it: womb. On the other hand, many of the Church’s most vociferous critics consider her to … Continue reading
What Is Christendom?
The question posed by the title of this article was asked several of us by our august editor. Its immediacy is reinforced by the season of Christmas – which, despite being under sporadic attack by “holiday” partisans, centers on the … Continue reading
Baseball’s Catholic Hero Roberto Clemente, Movie-Maker’s Dream
Catholic News Service tribute: When he was a young boy, Richard Rossi insisted that his dad get general-admission tickets behind right field at old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh so he could be as close as possible to his boyhood idol, Roberto … Continue reading
The Holy Ghost in Sight and Sound
This year, my High School religion course is covering, among other things, the Catholic doctrine concerning the Holy Ghost. Because I wanted to give my students a sense of how the rich heritage of Catholic art strives to express the … Continue reading
Signs of the Time
Recently a future King of England, dressed in an open-collared shirt and without a jacket, slid behind the steering wheel of a car and drove his wife, new-born son and himself away from a maternity hospital in London. He drove, … Continue reading
Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art
The Morgan Library & Museum, on Madison Avenue in New York, is hosting an exhibition called “Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art.” Here is the first paragraph of the Morgan Library’s description: When Christ changed bread and … Continue reading
Father Longenecker on Tolkien’s Dislike for C.S. Lewis’ Narnia
Patheos: If I had a time machine that could not only set me down not only in a particular date, but a particular place, I’d choose the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford on a Tuesday night in 1950 when … Continue reading
Mourning as an Act of Affirmation
In an unexpected way, my husband and I were recently led to a rather deep and deepening reflection on mourning (or mournfulness), and on its seeming incompatibility with human superficiality and human lukewarmness. We thereby also came to appreciate a … Continue reading
NICAEA: An Epic Movie in the Making
(Randy Engel/RenewAmerica) Following in the tradition of Mel Gibson’s ground breaking masterpiece, The Passion of Christ, the film Nicaea promises to be the second in what I hope will be a growing trend in the cinematic presentations of the divine … Continue reading
Death, Beauty, Transformation
“Death,” wrote poet Wallace Stevens, “is the mother of beauty.” Without putting his line in context, how might we interpret it? One interpretation could be that men make beautiful things, paintings, music, poems, to sweeten life in the face of … Continue reading
Baring, Dostoievski, and the Prevaricating Press
In 1927—some twenty-three years after the Menshevik Revolution and a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—Maurice Baring published an anthology of his earlier writings, entitled What I Saw in Russia. Lenin had died in 1924, and Stalin was on … Continue reading
The Charity of Song
Saint Augustine famously said cantare amantis est, that is, “singing belongs to one who loves” (s. 336, 1 – PL 38, 1472). (Josef Pieper wrote a book on this, and Robert Hickson gave a talk on it.) Apparently, the Doctor … Continue reading