“Strong art destabilizes the self,” a reader commented on my recent essay, “that’s its job.” Really? On the contrary, great art edifies. It engages the isolated and alienated self with goodness, truth, and beauty. It moves us beyond the confusion of the unstable self towards the true stability found in the fusion of sanity and [...]
The popularity of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” has paradoxically led us to underestimate the Venetian’s true greatness. Once renowned across Europe, by the early twentieth century Vivaldi was considered a minor composer. Then, several events occurred to re-awaken interest in the music of “The Red Priest.” Inevitably, when one hears the name of Antonio Vivaldi, one [...]
Train culture itself helped integrate communities into the larger, state, and national society in a way that left local autonomy intact. The nice thing about trains is that they bring people and things to your community and take them from your community to the wider world without erasing your actual community. My family and I [...]
Ours is the first nation under God which makes no real provision for God in its public life, owing to a great and sundering wall of separation between Church and State, religion and politics, faith and life. We live in a country whose citizenry have been, almost from the beginning of the Republic, carefully coached to [...]
The imagination invests the world with that richness and resonance which makes it an attractive dwelling for the intellect. But the imagination is indispensable to action as well. For the real world is worth our exertion only when the visionary imagination sets the scene for action. Tonight I shall commit the deliberate indiscretion of trying [...]
By 1741, George Frideric Handel had fallen deeply into debt, and was even threatened with debtors’ prison. Instead, he departed to Ireland for a sabbatical, where he wrote his "Messiah" in just twenty-four days. While Handel’s Messiah is, for many, an annual Advent spectacle, in the Classical Girl household, the 1741 oratorio gets pulled out during [...]
Catholic culture is, first and foremost, a society built upon a family whose identity draws from the Holy Family. In a culture where every contour of the public life assists in communicating the message of Jesus Christ, the first citizen of the realm will be the Church, she who is both Bride and Body of Christ, [...]
In “Ash Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot repudiated his ironic style along with his despairing and nihilistic view of the world. When he wrote it, he was turning from the hell of the wasteland of unbelief to receive his ashes and begin his long Lent. T.S. Eliot’s secret baptism in 1927 marked one of the most remarkable [...]
The one thing that unites man with his most ancient of ancestors and which divides him from all other creatures is his status as a sub-creator, as the imago Dei, who uses his imagination to create in the image of the Creator Himself. Art is the signature of man. —G.K. Chesterton G.K. Chesterton begins his [...]
“Should not church music be mostly for the heart?” —Joseph Martin Kraus The Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead—the Requiem, sometimes called Missa pro Defunctis (or Defuncto) or Messe des Morts—is surely the most dramatic of liturgical forms and has inspired countless composers, from medieval times to the present. What the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák, a devout [...]
So, then, what is Christian Culture? What does it look like? Are there certain defining features that distinguish it from what passes for culture these days? And if so, how are we to recognize them? What it is, at the deepest level, is an answer to the question raised by the Hebrew psalmist in a [...]
We can only bloom where we are planted. So, our job as finite beings—rooted in the soil of this world while yet being summoned to an infinite and eternal destiny—is to provide the best possible soil: culture. How to account for the Good News of Jesus Christ? The short answer is the Holy Ghost, who, in [...]
Chamber music is sometimes the best work of the best composers, and for that there is no acceptable substitute. When I first heard chamber music, it seemed an acquired taste, and subsequently a taste I acquired. So I will recite some personal history without any illusion that it matters because it was my experience. On [...]
The 1928 Book of Common Prayer is an important cultural artifact, whose influence on English language and literature rivals that of the Authorized Version of the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare. You will recall Parson Thwackum in Henry Fielding’s classic novel History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). Mr. (never, in proper ecclesiastical usage, Reverend) Thwackum [...]