Authority and Freedom:A Defense of the Arts–by jed perlknopf, 176 pages, $20. First Things Magazine. | In the slim volume Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, the longtime New Republic and New York Review of Books art writer Jed Perl assigns himself such a gigantic challenge that I found myself blushing on his… Read More Great Art Can Be Propaganda | First Things
I don’t mean to rain on Patrick Madrid’s (or anyone’s) parade. But consider. He writes in bold letters on ‘X’ that The Beatles are the “Greatest Band in History. Don’t Trust Anyone Who Doesn’t Like The Beatles!“. But the Beatles cast both genius and deepest shade. I’m in my 7th decade of life. I’ve loved… Read More The Beatles and Where We Are.
The events of 1968 had a strong bearing on his shift to a more conservative outlook. Excerpted from “POPE BENEDICT XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger.” (c) 2000 by John L. Allen, Jr.The Continuum. Joseph Ratzinger arrived at Tübingen [University] in 1966, still enthusiastic about the promise of Vatican II and ready to take his… Read More How the ’60s Changed Ratzinger
Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation. The phenomenon of Allen Ginsberg by Bruce Bawer, The New Criterion On Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, 1985. I’m so lucky to be nutty.—Allen Ginsberg, “Bop Lyrics” (1949) The very first poem in Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947-1980 [1] seems, in a way, to prophesy Ginsberg’s entire career. It is titled “In Society,” and it dates… Read More “You can see God by sniffing the gas in a cotton.” — Allen Ginsberg
When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the avant-garde was given diverse powerful platforms to announce that traditional art forms were passé, and art galleries exchanged space for the mystic likes of Picasso, Surrealism, and, in some degree, Andy Warhol, etc., they arguably prepared the way for the denial of natural gender distinctions and the… Read More From Rembrandt to Picasso
“Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream”—John Lennon Photo by Yoko Ono. Perhaps it is one of those curious fearful symmetries that the words of John Lennon quoted above are found in the Beatles’ album titled ‘Revolver’…and that he was finally gunned down, shot multiple times in the back by a “fan”. I… Read More John Lennon and The Seductions of Beautiful Nothing
…and Epistemology. [P]hilosophy and religion deal with the same basic questions. Christians, and especially evangelical Christians, have tended to forget this. Philosophy and religion do not deal with different questions, though they give different answers and in different terms. The basic questions of both philosophy and religion (and I mean religion here in the wide… Read More Francis Schaeffer on the Philosophy of being
The story is told of an archaeologist scholar who specialized in the earliest era of Christianity. He decided to take some students to visit ancient monasteries near the Sinai in Egypt. He was no believer. Upon arriving at one such site after a long journey he knocked on the entrance door hoping to be allowed… Read More The Scholar and the Abbot
“God is dead but given the way of men there may be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we will have to vanquish his shadow, too.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, # 109 At the very dawn of the 20th century, on 25 August in the year… Read More “Straying, as through infinite nothingness”: The Collapse of Nietzsche
Norman Geisler, the Evangelical scholar who studied at Loyola University, Chicago, reflects on Jean Paul Sartre’s atheism: “It should be noted … that Sartre’s attempt to eliminate God is seriously flawed. First of all, he constructs a straw God by defining him as “self-caused.” Most theists do not believe God is a self-caused being; they… Read More Sartre’s Humanism
David Starkey tracks the history and influence of the Dada movement of art and its influence in modern culture and life through his experiences with the Royal Academy. BBC: December 3, 2004. An autographed gentleman’s urinal has been named the most influential modern art work of all time. “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which shocked the… Read More April is the cruellest month
Before there was Gloria Steinem or Michel Foucault, there was Dada. And it was deadly serious. Kickoff, Demolition time. “Dada thrives on contradictions. It is creative and destructive. Dada denounces the world and wishes to save it.” So says one narrator of journalist-filmmaker Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Council of Great Britain documentary… Read More 1914. Europe After the Rain.
“Sexual expression, whether visual or written,” he speciously says, “can be a legitimate form of artistic expression,” proving he’s no better or more conservative than the rest of them, despite how giddy with pride he makes many conservatives feel, especially those who wrap their egoism in blockbuster podcasts touting American Patriotism and righteousness. Even Catholic… Read More Elon Musk’s X Deploys American “Liberty” for More Sex
Long march through the Institutions… 5/29/24. “… The offenses are all on a ‘do-not-prosecute’ list that was created by former Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins. Rollins, who later joined the Biden administration but resigned amid ethical violations, had advocated for the non-prosecution of more ‘low-level’ offenses… But Wu’s progressive outlook goes even further with the 39-year-old… Read More Boston’s woke mayor claims criminals should not be prosecuted for shocking crimes
Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War Independent, UK. 1995 For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works… Read More Independent, UK: Modern art was Government ‘weapon’.
Solange Strong Hertz. Quis ut Deus? Who is like God? The very name of St. Michael, Commander-in-Chief of the Church Militant, is a question. So capital a query immediately suggests another which must have preceded it: Who thinks he can be like God? Answers to both are given in Scripture, for God would not have… Read More The Primacy of Lucifer
Why “faith and culture”? Do they go together? Can they be separated? Can faith exist without culture? Can culture exist without faith? In the broadest sense of the word, faith and culture are inextricably connected because a culture is always an expression of the faith which informs it. If a culture is animated by a… Read More Faith and Culture by Joseph Pearce
It was Aldous Huxley who, very early, saw sexual decadence combining commercial interests with political manipulation in the emerging media. And he knew what that would mean for a culture. “Aldous Huxley in his 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World depicts a culture in which pleasure is compulsory and engineered to eliminate intellectual challenge and to… Read More Aldous Huxley, Sex, and Corporate Psychological Manipulation
Or, there are many ways to resent and persecute that which is hated. Originally Titled: Modern Art. The Goldsmith Company Lecture David StarkeyGoldsmith Lecture2017 The Inquiring Mind writes “Starkey is in great form in this lecture where he excoriates conceptual art “For the inaugural Goldsmiths’ Company lecture, Dr. David Starkey spoke on the subject of… Read More How Modern Art Took a Dump on Christian Western Civilization
Our children are the Guinea Pigs. By Christopher Rufo. First Things Magazine | The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin raised his glass to a group of artists assembled at the home of famed writer Maxim Gorky in 1932. “The ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he said, explaining that the communists… Read More Reengineering the Human Soul
Bends over backwards to save ubiquitous travesties. “A few months ago, I visited Lourdes for the first time, and when I saw the mosaics, I groaned out loud. Father Rupnik’s style is immediately recognizable, and my first thought was that the art would forever be tainted… Three years ago, he was even briefly excommunicated …… Read More America Magazine Compares Rupnik Cartoons to Caravaggio.
I “asked” Bing AI about those who see the traditional family as “a social structure of oppression” and who suggest that the dissolution of the traditional family might or would be a good thing for the world. I asked about those who say boys and girls, men and women, are becoming obsolete categories making room… Read More Catholic “Chat” with Bing AI About the Future, Family and Gender
Aldous Huxley stated plainly, “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption [SH: note that desire preceded investigation]. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with… Read More Huxley’s Faith and Confession
Oscar Wilde the would-be saint and Oscar Wilde the woeful sinner were in deadly conflict, one with the other… By Joseph Pearce|Liberal Learning, Literature. Oscar Wilde’s life is more scandalous today than it was during the Decadence of the 1890s. In fact, it is so scandalous that a current exhibition of his life and legacy… Read More Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Secret
When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Avant-garde were given powerful platforms to announce that traditional art forms were passé, and art galleries exchanged space for the mystic likes of Picasso, Surrealism, and in some degree Andy Warhol, etc., they arguably prepared the way for the denial of natural gender distinctions and the binary… Read More Rehabilitating Rockwell from the Culture of Kitsch
Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire “In the arid wasteland that is academic writing, amid the wider desert that is modern secular thought, R. J. Snell’s book on acedia is an oasis of flowers and fruit and fresh water. Professor Snell reminds us that man must never be made subordinate to work, nor even to the empty… Read More Acedia and Its Discontents
Andy Warhol’s self portrait (not the first photo seen here, but the purple thing…) sold some years back for $32.6 million. But that’s mere chump change; the highest price I’d seen fetched for a Warhol painting is $100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. Imagine. I mean, the pop painter, printmaker and so-called… Read More Perception as Value. Andy Warhol.
“What they are proposing to do to Notre-Dame [Paris] would never be done to Westminster Abbey or Saint Peter’s in Rome. It’s a kind of theme park and very childish and trivial given the grandeur of the place.’ … Under new proposals confessional boxes, altars and classical sculptures will be scrapped for trendy art murals,… Read More Notre Dame reportedly ‘being turned into woke theme park’
