Many Christians celebrate the Annunciation of the Lord on this day, and for years that was my only association with it. As it turns out, some combination of historical circumstances, fate, and tradition has placed a great deal of weight on this date, and the reason the Annunciation has been celebrated then is no mere coincidence but a participation in an older tradition preceding even the birth of Christ.
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Working on Beauty: Listening to Robert Johnson and Arnold Schoenberg
I would hate to relegate beautiful things to the realm of merely pleasurable things. Therefore I think it is important to regularly pursue experiences of the beautiful that do not initially appear to be pleasurable at all.
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Featured Artist: Matthew Paul Cleary
I first approached abstraction through sculpture—specifically the materials they were created from. What metaphorical weight do particular materials hold? How can these materials convey a message or a story to the viewer?
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Who Are the Rus?
Editorial Quick Take Three days before he launched the Russian invasion on Ukraine on February 24, Vladimir Putin delivered a speech that might have sounded to some like a bit of a rambling history lesson, reaching before the Bolsheviks all the way to the present time, with the aim of justifying the war waged on Ukraine here and now in 2022. In it he said, among other things: “Since time immemorial, the people living in the southwest of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians. This was the case before the 17th century, when a portion of this territory rejoined the Russian state, and after.” …
