Rifles and Rosary Beads You hold on to what you need Vicodin, morphine dreams Rifles and Rosary Beads Yellow smoke orange haze Blowin' into my eyes Whistling sunset bombs I couldn't trust the sky Rifles and Rosary Beads You hold on to what you need Vicodin, morphine dreams Rifles, Rosary Beads White knuckles wrapped around [...]
The positive secular reviews that have come in for my off-Broadway verse drama, "Death Comes for the War Poets," show the power of art to touch hearts even in enemy territory, in the secular art community of New York City, that most “woke” of communities in that most “woke” of cities. This shows the evangelizing [...]
The Church cannot continue to transform and humanize the world if she dispenses with the beauty of the liturgy. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the [...]
Constantino Brumidi’s fresco is less a deification of George Washington than it is a creative recording of his achievements and his legacy for our nation’s politicians. That the U.S. possesses its own rich history in art and boasts a series of internationally acclaimed painters is no surprise. Indeed, a walk through the Art Institute of [...]
Take a good look at the icon below. What do you see? Icons can be strange to our modern tastes. They are beautiful yet arrestingly otherworldly, with disorienting proportions and perspectives. Icons do not conform themselves to our own standards of judgment. To enter into the divine mysteries, we must relinquish our claim to be [...]
When I was eight years old I had an experience that set a trajectory for my whole life. I was lying in bed, I had the radio on—this was the 1970s—and Bruce Springsteen comes on with his 70s anthem “Born to Run.” Something broke open in my soul. Something grabbed a hold of me and [...]
Cristina Neagu Cristina Neagu specializes in the literature and arts of the Renaissance. She has a doctorate from the University of Oxford. The fields in which most of her work has been conducted include Neo-Latin literature, rhetoric, art history and history of the book. From 2003 until 2023 she was Keeper of Special [...]
It would be far too easy to see this life as merely a vale of tears—a time of trial we must experience and through which we must suffer with such virtue as we can muster, so as to reach a higher reward in the next life. What then could possibly make this life, on its [...]
We certainly value the great Catholic art of past generations, but we believe the greatest art, the greatest liturgy the Catholic Church has ever produced is yet to come, and we are pro-active in commissioning new liturgical music, poetry, and writing. Founded in 2013 by San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, the Benedict XVI Institute works [...]
The answers to the errors of modern times need to be given in philosophy and theology, but it is essential that we also experience the truth imaginatively. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. —Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” These famous lines of Keats [...]
Several trends have alienated ordinary laypeople from the worlds of both art and intellect, contributing to anti-intellectualism and hostility to the arts, as well as simple indifference to the finer things of culture. This is deplorable because the arts and the life of the mind are both important. When I was about five years old, [...]
Our cultural confusions, especially among the educated, reveal a language desperately in need of repair, a reality in need of rediscovery. Differences in rank, in particular, were obvious until the dawn of modern scientism, the political ideology of technocratic materialism. An extremely liberal, atheist British comedian came out in support of Britain’s new free speech [...]
Daniel McInerny's "Beauty and Imitation" seeks to retrieve, with the philosophical aid principally of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, the pre-modern understanding of art as imitation of the beautiful forms that make up sacred order. Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflections on the Arts, by Daniel McInerny (448 pages, Word on Fire Academic, 2024) Once [...]
Raffaella Maria Stroik, a 23-year-old ballerina, died tragically in November 2018, drowning in a lake in Missouri. This real-life tragedy has now been transformed or transfigured, as if by magic or miracle, into a beautiful fairytale ballet, inspired by Raffaella’s devout and fervent Catholic faith. Fairyland and perfection have a great deal in common. They [...]