The beauty contest illustrates the difficulty with the term for and maybe the very idea of gentlemanliness—are good and beautiful two criteria or one? If they are two, how are they related? Could the beautiful be whatever compellingly attracts? Furthermore, what is truly and justly compelling? Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series dedicated to [...]
“Should not the unswerving modernists… come to the realization that there is nothing more wearisome or more barren than the most antiquated of all manias: the rage to be modern?” Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) In my visits to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, I generally sidestep the East Building, the portion devoted to modern [...]
Now, when the subatomic world and the cosmological universe seem to reveal some of the inconsistencies in modern theoretical physics, could the whole idea of a world sitting on fundamental elements be in question? Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, by Sabine Hossenfelder (304 pages, Basic Books, 2018) Sabine Hossenfelder’s little book Lost in [...]
The imagination is a gift from God, given in His own image, to conceive of a Glorious Reality that does exist, that we cannot yet fully see... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Aaron Ames, as he considers the Divine source of beauty and imagination.—W. Winston Elliott [...]
All through the 1960s, my generation had been riveted by the space race started by President Kennedy. But what the astronauts accomplished on Christmas Eve of 1968 left us awestruck, and I remember it not as a moment of victory in the space race, but as an opening of religious wonder on that Christmas Eve… [...]
In a world ringing with noise and suffused with the more or less artful idolizing of passions divorced from objective goods, where are we to find melodies capable of penetrating our hardened hearts with spiritual truths? In Plato’s Republic, Socrates leads a group of ambitious young Athenians on a search for the best way of [...]
Poetry is a paradox. It is the most complex and inimitable expression of thought and consciousness, but it is also the most natural and ancient. Although a form of oral and written tradition that has persisted throughout the years, poetry is dismissed as unnecessary and impractical in literary education… A decline in English majors at universities demonstrates [...]
Not unlike the times of Our Lord, we live in the paradox of a world in disorder yet under the appearance of order. Beneath the veneer of optimism and prosperity, many people experience lives of trial and suffering due to the lifestyles of frenetic intemperance they have adopted. […]
It is the encounter with beauty, all-consuming beauty, the infinite, which directs the human soul back to God. The sky calls us up; the earth drags us down. On December 2, 1805, the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte achieved his most spectacular victory at the Battle of Austerlitz against an allied army of Russians and Austrians. [...]
Though land and setting seem rarely featured in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, they do comprise an unusual role, one that grows towards the past instead of the future. Cather expresses a sentimentality and longing for the old ways because it somehow grounds her central character Thea Kronborg. For Thea, the desert town [...]
Though William Sidney Mount’s name is rarely mentioned except among art experts, the images he created are timeless Americana—skillfully rendered scenes full of homely comforts and the joy of life. “How glorious it is to paint in the open fields, to hear the birds singing around you, to draw in the fresh air—how thankful it makes [...]
As Christians, we may say that God is our Good Shepherd, our Rock and our Salvation, our Lawgiver and King, the Light of the World, and rejoice that we have these names—as opposed to definitions—that help us to understand Him. Analytic philosophy is limited in its scope regarding the knowledge of God. Richard Swinburne, a [...]
We don’t often stop and consider the elements, material and otherwise, that makeup architecture and urban spaces. Often, we think of them as simply the background against which we live, the setting for the drama of our human existence... “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” —Winston Churchill People love good streets. Americans who [...]
It is as if our tattooed millennials are trying to make themselves sacred creatures fallen to earth: beings who wear the secrets of the universe—known to the few—on their thighs, on their arms. They are gnostics trapped in narcissism. Here’s something a sixty-three year old man thinks about. Once, girls in their summer dresses filled [...]