During the Italian Renaissance, an art form emerged known as the sacra conversazione or “sacred conversation.” Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, later Titian and others painted the Madonna and Christ Child talking with saints and sometimes the artist’s own patrons. Recalling Dante’s beatific vision, figures otherwise separated by time and space meet in the planes of […]
A priest recently joked that his favorite thing to tell middle schoolers who are maybe getting too big for their britches is “you know, God didn’t have to create you.” Everyone listening laughed, but the priest pointed out that while that might sound unkind on the surface, it signifies something quite the opposite. In her […]
When one loves, one does not calculate. – St. Therese of Lisieux Gave me cookie, got you cookie! We’re even, we’re even, Schmidt! – Nick Miller New Girl has disappointed me lately with the way that it treats (or trivializes) Eros. But a recent episode surprised me with a more sincere look at love between […]
“Glory be to God for dappled things,” I thought, pausing on a run in the woods near my house. The late afternoon sun came slanting through the grey tree trunks and lit up the leaves like bits of stained-glass in a church window. All around me, layers of fallen leaves obscured the paths so that […]
This week, I went to a thought-provoking presentation on Plato’s critique of government sponsored by the Institute of Catholic Culture. You can watch the whole thing here soon. But this post isn’t going to be about government. Something else caught my attention at the talk. At one point in his critique of government, Plato describes […]
“Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?” This is the question pondered by Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner at a forced-labor camp in the Soviet Gulag system. Shukhov is the imagined narrator of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Though Shukhov may be fictional, his experiences come out of […]
One of Shakespeare’s most poetic speeches is spoken by a character who spends half the play turned halfway into a donkey. The play is A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the character is the very foolish Nick Bottom. Always pay attention to Shakespeare’s fools. Often, they possess wisdom which escapes the wits of more refined men. […]
