Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. Genesis 2 We are the only naming creature that we know of. We […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Blog No. 75: Authority
Catholic reform was as sensual as it was spiritual, for at the core of the Catholic faith lay the claim that all of creation is a gateway to the Creator and that matter and spirit are not antithetically opposed to one another. Exuberance is the hallmark of Catholic art and music from this period. In […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Blog No. 74: I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light
The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Blog No. 73: Having a better opinion of mankind
Speaking of the thought of Marcus Aurelius, Montesquieu said “Such is the effect that it produces that we have a better opinion of ourselves because we have a better opinion of men.” This idea provides a fine means of evaluating art. When engaging art, your standard should be whether it gives you a better opinion […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Blog No. 72, Blinded by the Light
The multiplicity of forms! The hummingbird, the fox, the raven, the sparrow hawk, the otter, the dragonfly, the water lily! And on and on. It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day. Mary Oliver, from “Good Morning” in Blue Horses: Poems A world with […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Blog No. 71 What is the nature of the individual?
Human experience is multifaceted; the natural objective world, the subjective experience of that world, the relationship between humans, the need for something beyond ourselves, eros and agape and everything in between. We necessarily choose a perspective, a paradigm to understand this torrent of experience because we are limited in our ability to understand it in […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Blog No. 70: Other Kingdoms
“For art cannot live in the world of kitsch, which is a world of commodities to be consumed, rather than icons to be revered. True art is an appeal to our higher nature, an attempt to affirm that other kingdom in which moral and spiritual order prevails. Others exist in this realm not as compliant […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Blog No. 69, Soul Matter
Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses…. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell How about a crazy hypothesis? Blake is technically correct. Under this hypothesis our bodies would be composed of normal matter, which we sense using our […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Blog No. 68: How small the cosmos
How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words! Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov Being people on the this side of the greatest social revolution in the history of mankind, the Enlightenment, we assume that […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Blog 77: Surprise Me
I must admit to bouts of blindness; not ocular blindness, but worse, a failure to understand what was obviously before me. I have read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and always found it depressingly banal. I would read the poem, read various analyses of it, but in the end I just didn’t see what the […]