It is Beethoven—not Bach or Mozart—who is the most universally popular composer in the classical canon. Why is this? Some authors have posited his democratic social beliefs or his personal story of victory over deafness. These are all certainly factors, but I prefer to look first at the aesthetic qualities of the music itself. Johann [...]
Johann Sebastian Bach shows how mind and soul, spirit and body connect. In its complex richness and wholeness his music suggests the unity of faith and reason, science, and imagination. Full of relationships that stimulate the ear and the mind, it expresses the multifold splendor of creation itself. “To strip human nature until its divine [...]
The book donation program at my library is not just a means of receiving books; it has also become, even more, a mechanism for disposing of excess. As a volunteer, you think of yourself as cultivating a neat little garden, not unlike that small monastic library of the Middle Ages. Every Wednesday I head over [...]
If you are unfamiliar with theological classics and want an easeful entryway, here is what you should do: run to On the Incarnation, a short treatise written by St. Athanasius of Alexandria in the fourth century, in the English translation done by Sister Penelope Lawson in 1944. It features an introduction by C S. Lewis, [...]
The music of little-known Baroque composer Francesco Antonio Bonporti embodies a kind of Arcadian serenity and joy, like the music of Mozart. Art conceived along those lines is closely tied to the refinement of the spirit, in which the senses do not go their own brutish way but are reconciled with the mind by means [...]
Josef Pieper stresses that the “end of times” religiously understood is not an annihilation. God does not revoke his creation. Rather, the “catastrophe” of the end times is to be understood as a final apotheosis of evil, leading to the end of time and earthly existence and opening out into redemption and new creation. “It [...]
Daniel Fitzpatrick's book "Restoring the Lord’s Day" is, in essence, a diagnosis of the ills of modernity viewed from the aspect of the Sabbath. Lost today are the grandeur and the normative and unitive force of the Sabbath, the center of the life of the individual, the family, and the community. Restoring the Lord’s Day: [...]
To anyone who feels beaten down by the bleakness of the world around us, my advice is this: seek to rise above the soundbites and thought-clichés of journalism, politics, and academia. Instead, inquire about the truth from the great tradition. Keep the sabbath, cultivate the soul and the mind, study nature. Maintain that flame of [...]
Arcangelo Corelli was a giant of the Baroque era of Western music and, though it might be easy to forget today, one of the most historically important and popular composers who ever lived. His "Christmas Concerto" has endured as his most popular work and one of the great classical pieces for the Christmas season. [...]
The contrast between heaven and earth is one of the most pervasive concepts in religious language, a commonplace so common that we rarely stop to think about its meaning. What does it mean, in mythopoetic terms and in literal terms? To put it plainly, what is heaven and what is earth? I was blessed to [...]
Our search for truth in this earthly life is not a march to the grave, but a journey of progressive illumination, in which each day brings the promise of some new wonder, some fresh joy. “Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will [...]
Now not just certain individuals, the Swiss-German philosopher Max Picard argued, but the entire culture itself is in flight from God. It is manifested in every phase of life. But the fact that we are fleeing from God means that God is pursuing us. Among the many diagnoses about modernity that have been made, the [...]
Fear and fun mingle in a dark embrace in these days of late October and early November. All these magical feelings are at the historical heart of Halloween, and Ray Bradbury has the children in "The Halloween Tree" unravel this mystic chain that unites us with our ancestors of long ago. Among Ray Bradbury’s many [...]
As I peruse conservative cultural commentary, I am troubled by a lack of awareness and appreciation for 20th-century art music. The music of a composer like Franco Margola has much to teach us about how modernity can connect with tradition and the values of civilization. Italy, like all countries in Western civilization, has had its [...]