Search results for: The Beauty Dialogues
An Architecture of Abundance: A Conversation with John Marx
By Issue 113
Architects in the Bay Area talk about concepts and ideas. I talk about poetry. I look at a design project and ask, how can I make something emotionally meaningful?
Read MoreDivine Intimations: Contemporary Floral Design for Sacred Spaces
By Visual Art Issue 112
Even John Calvin, who forbade the use of images in worship, waxed eloquent on the beauty of the natural world and the presence of God in the theater of creation. Arranged flowers seem an ideal way to bring that “third book” of God into the sacred space.
Read MoreImagining Water: Myth, Ritual, and a Changing Planet
By Visual Art Issue 120
NEAR THE REPUTED SITE of the Garden of Eden, an international team of environmental engineers, sewage treatment experts, and others are restoring historic marshlands in what has become a desert wasteland. They are creating a new Eden-not simply a public works project that will filter wastewater for the Ahwar region in southern Iraq, but also…
Read MoreT.S. Eliot, Agent of His Own Demise
October 3, 2016
In my last post for Good Letters, I took minor issue with a point my friend and mentor Gregory Wolfe made about the relative prominence of Christian public intellectuals around the middle of the last century. Wolfe named, as examples of such prominence, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul…
Read MoreThe New Critics and the Barbarians
September 8, 2016
The poet and writer Dana Gioia penned an essay for the December 2013 issue of First Things titled “The Catholic Writer Today: Catholic Writers Must Renovate and Reoccupy Their Own Tradition.” The essay does not inspire much confidence in the state of “Catholic” writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our own Gregory Wolfe…
Read MoreThe Vision Will Not Disappoint
August 23, 2018
It is a miracle that we do not love; love is the watermark in the parchment of our existence. It is to love’s melody that our limbs respond. Whoever loves is obeying the impulse of life in time; whoever refuses to love is struggling (uselessly) against the current. —Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the…
Read MoreOn the Front Lines
December 21, 2016
Seven months ago, I was teaching writing to high school seniors at a Christian school on the southwest side of Chicago, thirty minutes from my suburban hometown but essentially in another universe. I was three months away from finishing my MFA through Seattle Pacific University, and I wasn’t sure that I was going to make…
Read MoreThe Art We Live With
By Editorial Issue 104
While we creatives apprentice ourselves to various crafts, aspiring to art that is “fine,” we might also look for subtle ways to decorate our daily lives with new intentionality. There is a training of the soul in the arts we live with.
Read MoreArts & Faith Top 10 films of 2017: Part 1
February 5, 2018
Cinema at its best has the power to transform minds, to inspire generations, and to speak across geographical, intellectual, and educational borders. Cinema can encourage, motivate, and challenge the hearts, minds, and souls of anyone willing to engage within the visual journey. We’ve witnessed stories of faith, sacrifice, redemption, and persecution. We’ve discovered the call…
Read MoreThe Problems of Painting
By Essay Issue 60
Painters Frame Contemporary Painting Painting has died and been resurrected several times in recent decades. Challenged by theory-laden conversations about art’s “post-medium” condition and a welter of deconstructionist propositions, painting seems nevertheless to have thrived in the face of adversity. Some would say it remains as manifold and imaginative as ever. In order to take…
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