“Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback?” by Ross Douthat in The New York Times So the world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago. But the question is whether the religious can reclaim real cultural ground—especially in the heart of secularism, the Western intelligentsia—as opposed to just stirring up a vague nostalgia for belief. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that,…
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Featured Artist: Stephanie Hunder
Stephanie Hunder’s art is inspired by memories of growing up in the woodlands and prairies of Minnesota. Her work often begins with forms and textures drawn from landscapes, which are then combined with scientific diagrams as a way to investigate our contemporary relationship to the natural world.
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Bored at the Museum
When you enter the room where it’s hanging, even before you fully register what the painting represents, the pleasure is already there, just as you turn the corner and see it on the wall.
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Carrying Grief
Even if it is helpful to know that deep grief is quieting, it is consoling that some are closer to our particular pain. Most people immediately become awkward when I mention the miscarriage. It makes sense to me, as I act similarly around people who have more extensive familiarity with death than I do. I have never experienced the death of a child I have given birth to, have never yet experienced the death of a parent or a spouse. I am not old; I still cannot, as my professor told me in college, really understand Lear. But at twenty-five, watching Lear carry the body of Cordelia and cry, “Why…
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Miami Miami
You are sitting on the couch watching football some Saturday afternoon. Maybe it’s halftime of your home state's annual Civil War game. Maybe two top ten teams are warming up for kickoff. Or you are just flipping channels looking for a close contest. But as score updates scroll along the bottom of the screen, one stands out: Miami University. "Wait, Miami University of … Ohio? Why is there a Miami University in the State of Ohio? Isn’t Miami in Florida?"
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Daniel Nayeri on Poetry and Bravery
Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for.
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Chagall on Stained Glass
For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world. Stained glass has to be serious and passionate. It is something elevating and exhilarating. It has to live through the perception of light. To read the Bible is to perceive a certain light, and the window has to make this obvious through its simplicity and grace.
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Jules Kaye on a Child’s Experience of the World
Reynolds hasn't witnessed the beauty that I have; he's stood before lovely insights, oblivious to them. The sole gestalt that inspires him is the one I ignored: that of the planetary society, of the biosphere. I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity. Each feels that the other has ignored great opportunities.
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Ted Chiang on The Lover of Beauty vs. The Lover of Humanity
Reynolds hasn't witnessed the beauty that I have; he's stood before lovely insights, oblivious to them. The sole gestalt that inspires him is the one I ignored: that of the planetary society, of the biosphere. I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity. Each feels that the other has ignored great opportunities.
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Benedict XVI on Classical and Christian Art
The distant origins of this institution date back to a work we might well describe as "profane" — the magnificent sculptural group of the Laocoon — but which, in fact, acquires its fullest and most authentic light in the Vatican context. It is the light of the human creature shaped by God, of freedom in the drama of his redemption that extends between Heaven and earth, flesh and spirit. It is the light of a beauty that shines out from within the work of art and leads the mind to open itself to the sublime, where the Creator encounters the creature made in his image and likeness.
