Excerpts from Integrated Art: Expressions of a Deified Reality, New Oxford Review By Thomas J. Kronholz | New Oxford Review | November 2025. Thomas J. Kronholz is a systematic theologian, author, and classical pianist. He holds advanced degrees in systematic theology from Notre Dame Graduate School at Christendom College and piano performance from the Peabody Institute… Read More Integrated Art: Expressions of a Deified Reality
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
When a friend called me this morning with the news that Susan Sontag had died at the age 71, just about the first thing I thought was, “well, we’ll have a huge, hagiographical, front-page obituary tomorrow in The New York Times.” Check to see if I am correct. In the meantime, as you prepare yourself… Read More Susan Sontag: a Prediction by Roger Kimball. 2004
“Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream”—John Lennon 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 grew up reading Kerouac… Read More John Lennon and The Seductions of Beautiful Nothing
The New Criterion October 2005 Rediscovering Matisse by Hilton Kramer On Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954, by Hilary Spurling. Even those of us who have loved Matisse’s work since we began to look at paintings as a serious interest could not have suspected what it had cost this great artist… Read More Rediscovering Matisse. Hilton Kramer.
“In this two-part episode of Thinking Out Loud, Nathan Rittenhouse and Cameron McAllister dive deep into the fascinating idea of being “crypto-religious”—a term coined by Polish poet Czesław Miłosz and revived in Paul Elie’s new book The Last Supper. Together, Nathan and Cameron explore how artists like Bob Dylan, Madonna, Prince, Bono, and Andy Warhol… Read More Crypto-religous Music and Art?
“We’ll get you through your children.” —Allen Ginsberg, 1958 The core of the heresy of the Free Spirit lay in the adept’s attitude towards himself: he believed that he had attained a perfection so absolute that he was incapable of sin. Disclaiming book-learning and theological subtleties, they rejoiced in direct knowledge of God- indeed, they… Read More The Beat Generation… cultural catastrophe. By Roger Kimball
Updated with his full masterpiece: For the Bride below. John Michael Talbot (born May 8, 1954) is an American Catholic musician, author, television presenter and founder of a Third Order monastic community known as the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. Talbot was born into a Methodist family with a musical background in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and started learning to play the guitar… Read More Sunrise miracle, Daily
By Gary Potter. The subject here is a movie, one I think could be the most important made in my lifetime, at least in terms of cinema’s future. Its importance doesn’t make it a favorite nor even that I have especially enjoyed seeing it. Do we “enjoy” seeing, say, Shakespeare’s Richard III? A particular production… Read More Terrance Malick’s “The Tree of Life”
By Joseph Pearce | May 29th, 2025 |Categories: Joseph Pearce, The Imaginative Conservative. If pride might be said to be the making of God in our own image, a lesser form of pride is the making of our gods, our idols, into our own image. This latter form of pride, what might be called pride in the lower… Read More Shakespeare: Saint or Sinner?
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.
— from Part II of the Catholics & American Life Symposium. New Oxford Review. January-Febuary 2025. On Christmas Day 1886, 18-year-old Paul Claudel — raised Catholic but delinquent in his faith — was listening to vespers in Notre-Dame de Paris. It was an event that “dominates my entire life,” he later recounted. “My heart was touched, and… Read More Karl Keating: Catholics & American Life
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
By Norman Podhoretz. Sex, drugs, America, the middle class, and “poetry power”: reflections on a literary entanglement of 50 years’ duration. by Norman Podhoretz, 1997. “Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet of Beat Generation, Dies at 70,” proclaimed the headline on the front page of the New York Times for April 6, 1997. Reading it, I was moved more deeply… Read More My War With Allen Ginsberg
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.
Modern humans should consider the plank in their own eye before presuming to see a mote in the eye of their ‘primitive’ neighbors. Joseph Pearce | August 14, 2024.National Catholic Register. Contempt of neighbor takes many forms. We can turn up our supercilious noses at our neighbors because of their skin color or because of their… Read More Learn to Love Your Neolithic Neighbors. Joseph Pearce.
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’.
C. S. Lewis once said that reading literature from the past is like a clean sea breeze blowing through our musty minds. Interview by Greg Peters. This article is from the November 2023 issue. Christianity Today. In recent decades, evangelicals studying faith in the Middle Ages have done much to recover its variety and richness. Yet… Read More Mystics, Monastics, and the Moderns Who Need Them
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
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
The Woke Reductionist trashing of ‘Sound of Freedom‘. “This year’s Angel Studios’ Sound of Freedom is turning heads due to it becoming a surprise Independence Day hit. Over a million tickets have been sold ahead of its July 4 release, raking in more than $10 million in pre-sales, per Deadline. The PG-13 film is based on the true… Read More Just Another ‘White Man Savior’ Film? Jason Whitlock Analyses This Trope.
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.
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
By Italy specialist Shannon I’ve always been drawn to Italy’s places of worship because of the stories of controversy and intrigue hidden in their elaborate sculptures, paintings and façades. For my Art History degree, I studied in Florence and attended lectures in churches and basilicas throughout Italy. There I learned that when you’re seeing a… Read More Sidewalk Evangelism
Damian Thompson associate editor of The Spectator writes, “Ludwig van Beethoven had a profound faith in God. He was born and raised a Catholic and on his deathbed he asked to receive the Last Rites. He told the priest, ‘I thank you, ghostly sir – you have brought me comfort.’ One of his closest friends,… Read More Why didn’t Beethoven Go to Mass?
—Sacred Traditio, Sacred Liturgy, Sacred Space, Sacred Scripture. “Try to wrap your head around…” — Culture critic, Florence, Italy
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
How do we experience life? What is it to be human? How do we see? What is the relationship between reading and history, reading and science, metaphysics…empathy, philosophy, religion and art? …More. — How to Mark a Book by Mortimer Adler — The social disaster: Children who frequently check social media face significant brain changes
By Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene, O.C.D O my Savior, Word of God, how can I doubt that You are coming upon earth to save and sanctify me? Why do I not go to You with complete, loving confidence, when You have spared nothing to show me Your infinitely merciful love? Your Incarnation, Your… Read More The Greater Interior Silence of Advent
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
Weaponizing Jesus, Flowers, Rainbows… It was never a controversy about skin color for Catholics, despite NCRs disingenuous claims. The problem went much, much, deeper. “First unveiled on NBC’s Today Show in 2000, Janet McKenzie’s painting, Jesus of the People was the first place winner of the National ‘Catholic’ Reporter’s global competition to identify an image of Jesus… Read More Why NCRs Androgynous ‘Jesus 2000’ Was a Problem
Note: One need not care for Hollywood and its often amoral actors in the slightest to have sympathy for victims of addictions in general. Many of us know or love persons who have suffered—and made others suffer— from addictions. Christians are no more immune to it than their enemies. Some jump into it. Other slide.… Read More Johnny Depp and Substance Abuse. What we can learn.
The gifted Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, by any standard, was a most extraordinary person. Donald DeMarcoNational Catholic Register February 23, 2022 Sigrid Undset walked into the manager’s office of the Aschehoug publishing company, one of the largest in Norway, and tossed G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) onto his desk, exclaiming that “this is the… Read More Sigrid Undset — A Catholic Woman for Our Time
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 behalf… Read More Great Art Can Be Propaganda | First Things
The Irish journalist John Waters writes in First Things (excerpts follow), “In 1972, the year ABBA was formed, an English journalist named Roland Huntford published The New Totalitarians, in which he exposed the underbelly of Swedish “progressivism”: a near century as a one-party state under the Social Democrats, featuring crude anti-family policies and rampant state incursion… Read More ABBA And The New Totalitarians
Catholic Critique 