Culture
‘To contemplate means first of all to see—and not to think!
How meticulously, how intensively—with the heart, as it were—must a sculptor have gazed on a human face before being able, as is our friend here, to render a portrait, as if by magic, entirely from memory!’
-Josef Pieper
Comment Magazine
Children of Mammon, Children of God
Killers of the Flower Moon, and the long spiritual drama between American Indians and settlers
Comment Magazine
Men only want one thing: the moral equivalent of monkhood
Comment Magazine
The Community Community
How concrete relationships came to be replaced by abstract categories, and why it matters.
Ekstasis Magazine
Buttered Transcendence
So it was, sitting among good friends around the table in Dante’s city that I, as on some other occasions was granted a vision, like Moses, of the Holy Land flowing with things to eat and drink.
When Dvorak Went to Iowa to Meet God
Plough Quarterly
For Dvořák, music and home came into the world as twins, and, where one was found, the other was not far behind.
The Million Masks of God
Plough Quarterly
Race hatred was not just a personal attack, but an affront to divine justice. In a quiet way, his art was subverting the impulse to dehumanize by proclaiming in paint the dignity of the human person.
The Book of Repose
Plough Quarterly
People are like trees. They are never as independent as they seem above ground, and they rely on hidden connections to other individuals of the species for nourishment.
The Sabbath City
Comment Magazine
The reason that people feel alienated in so many contemporary developments is that they experience what the design of the space is telling them; they know that they are being reduced to something a bit less than they are, and that the architect and client have thought of them as interchangeable units in a process over which they have no control and which they can never even totally see.