“He [the new priest] also kept it differently, scouring away the blood after each slaughter and sprinkling fresh water; it smelled cleaner and less holy.” —C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces They say cleanliness is next to godliness. They, as “they” usually are, are wrong. G.K. Chesterton reminds us that saints can afford to [...]
Summer has become a season of strange and stark irony. While it brings forth the beauty of the world, it also brings forth the ugliness of the age. The warmth and light are invariably attended by trashy fashion and tattooed flesh. These dog-days, there is hardly a street or a store without people who appear [...]
In Yosemite Valley one can walk for miles through a meadow surrounded by granite monoliths, cliffs, and forested mountain peaks. The view changes every time one turns, but remains stunning. A relatively short distance away is a hike to Yosemite Falls—one of the world’s tallest—for views of water and mist tumbling over sheer walls of [...]
Pearl Street, Boulder, CO The beauty of Colorado’s Front Range continues to overwhelm me. I do not think it is a mere temporary giddiness as the Birzer family adjusts to its new home. Everything feels not only comfortable culturally for this writer raised in neighboring Kansas, but every varied environment as the Great [...]
During the Easter Triduum, the faithful are invited to ponder Christ’s passion at Helen’s Holy Cross in Jerusalem and to continue the meditations of Holy Saturday at Constantine’s Lateran Basilica of Christ the Savior. But the joy of Easter morning is proclaimed in a special way at the church dedicated to the Mother of God, [...]
While I don’t know much about the techniques of painting, landscapes, and portraiture, I know what I like. And, I very much like—well, love is much more accurate—the art of Anna Rose Bain. Anna left quite an impression on almost everyone after spending four years at Hillsdale. As talented as she is kind and beautiful, [...]
There is something about the call of a bird from the peak of a mountain or the top branches of a tree or the heights of the sky that makes my soul cry out with longing. There is something in the sight of a bird soaring weightlessly above the ground, just beneath the clouds, or [...]
There is a perfect cup of tea. An Englishman knows it can occur most easily at 4 pm (or, say, 8 am), when the solar system is aligned in a particular way. When in a foreign country, he looks around hopefully at five minutes to 4 in case tea is beginning to appear, but he [...]
Stars in the Water, by Rosie Caldecott Traditionally, truth, goodness and beauty are properties of all being, of everything that exists, in one degree or another. Truth is being as known– the correspondence and coherence of the idea and the reality. Goodness is being as willed–acting in accordance with the fullness of that [...]
Frost Fractal The world as a whole is complex, but it is also a unity. It is “simplex”, founded on simple principles. Poets, painters, scientists and mathematicians are all searching for simplexity in their own way. Aesthetic pleasure is very largely the delight we feel in seeing order, meaning and relationship—the beauty that [...]
Not long after Bob Dylan’s conversion, I heard him give a radio interview. For obvious reasons, I always considered him a tough challenge in such settings. He can be moody, unpredictable, combative, and cryptic. In this discussion, he was true to form. That, and Dylan continually strummed his guitar in the background, muffling both the [...]
One of the privileges of writing this column is that I occasionally get to meet the composers of the music I review. I had a meeting this past year with a musician with whom I have been in correspondence for some time. Morten Lauridsen, the most frequently performed American choral composer, came to Washington, D.C. [...]
The title of Gregory Wolfe’s excellent collection of essays, Beauty Will Save the World, is based on a much-quoted line from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In its context it appears only in indirect speech, being attributed by one of the other characters to the “Idiot” of the title, Prince Myshkin. Thus in its original context its [...]
[My recent book, Beauty in the Word, a sequel to Beauty for Truth’s Sake, is quite dense and complicated, so I thought it would be helpful to readers if I produced a “study guide”. So, in a series of posts, I look at some of the key themes and ideas in the book.] IV. The Mother of [...]