Why did my teacher, who regularly takes commissions for iconography and teaches iconography workshops, who spent five years in an Orthodox monastery training as an iconographer, draw back from saying the words, “I am an iconographer”?
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Origami, Neusis and Angle Trisection
The history of mathematics tells us that oftentimes approved technique is as much a matter of philosophical commitments and aesthetic sensibilities as it is a matter of pure utility.
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A Thank You Note to Dead Poets Society
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was 18 years old, mid-February of my senior year of high school. Dad was giving me a ride to meet some friends, and on the way, the topic of college came up.
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Drawing or Color? The Poussinistes versus the Rubénistes
Every age has had arguments about art and beauty that are deeply entangled in questions of philosophy, society and even morality. One of the most heated took place in France at in the late 17th century.
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Blessed Are the Losers
For the most part, the Coen brothers don't seem particularly interested in the stories of those who come in first place. They appear to be more preoccupied by those who come in last. They don't even seem to be as inspired by a good old-fashioned "underdog" parable as most people are. (If the Coens told the story of David and Goliath, the little shepherd boy would definitely not have been the victor.) How many other filmmakers can you think of that consistently make their movies about losers rather than winners?
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Karl Marx’s Letter to Abraham Lincoln
Wait ... what??? One of the challenges of teaching world history is that events unfold in both time and space. Focus on what was happening all around the world at a given time, and you lose the ability to tell a clear story. But focus on a story as it unfolded in a particular place (say America, France, China or Russia), and you risk putting history into silos.
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On Rembrandt, Boredom, Chalk Art, and the Ozarks
For our readers’ enjoyment, we will be periodically passing on a set of links from journals, newspapers, like-minded blogs or other sources – a small compendium of items from the world wide web that have struck us over the course of the past few weeks. Enjoy our first offerings below!
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The Moviegoer: Suburbia, the Search, and Binx Bolling’s Existential Homelessness (Book Recommendation)
The movies tend to conceive of despair, as they do of love, in terms of external obstacles that are overcome, end-of-story. So they gloss over our existential amnesia, and they confuse our actual despair (our wrong relation to God, self, and world) with felt despair. As Binx Bolling sees it, this apparent comedy is really the tragedy of man accustomed to despair. The man may have regained the world, but it turned out he never had a soul if his predicament is reducible to [re]obtaining the American Dream.
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The Education of the Heart
If we can bear witness to our students that we love the world, that we love the reality beneath our subjects, that we love them and that ultimately the love of God surrounds all of that, education can be a powerful 'something to start from.'
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Politics, Publishing, and Snowy Woods
Unless you were paying close attention, you may have missed a momentous occasion in politics and publishing earlier this year.
