art

The sexualization of young girls doesn’t bother some parents

News channels and parenting blogs have been on fire the past few days over a video of 8-year-old girls dancing to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” during a dance competition. The girls do a lot of gyrating and are dressed in bikini-like dance costumes. ABC interviewed one set of parents who justified the dance by saying the … Read more

The Big Problem

You cannot act for twenty-four hours without deciding either to hold people responsible or not to hold them responsible. Theology is a product far more practical than chemistry. Some Determinists fancy that Christianity invented a dogma like free will for fun — a mere contradiction. This is absurd. You have the contradiction wherever you are. … Read more

On Beauty: A Message to Its Religious Despisers

What did Fyodor Dostoevsky mean in The Idiot when one of his characters asserts, “Beauty will save the world”? Taken at face value, it’s a claim that beauty plays a role in the salvation of us all. There are quite a few Christians, of all denominations, who would respond to that claim with suspicion, if … Read more

Super-Sizing the Last Supper

According to a panel of obesity experts, the Last Supper has been getting super-sized in artistic representations through the years: The Cornell University team studied 52 of the most famous paintings of the Biblical scene over the millennium and scrutinised the size of the feast. They found the main courses, bread and plates put before … Read more

Resisting Bigness

If you’ve lived in our nation’s capital as long as I have, which is all my life, you get used to bigness, as a fact and also as a cherished ideal. Big office buildings like the Pentagon and the grotesque Rayburn Building, where many members of the House of Representatives hang out in style. Big … Read more

Perfect Work

In 2003, I discovered quite unexpectedly that I was pregnant. I was in the middle of my course work for my Ph.D., so we weren’t yet “trying” to get pregnant, but it has a way of happening in a marriage. We were overjoyed to discover the positive pregnancy test — but things quickly went wrong … Read more

Are You Temperate, Insensible, or Insatiable?

Last week I offered some theoretical and practical tips for Temperance. Since this virtue is tied in so tightly to physical health, it takes different forms in various people, and its demands can change with age. A young person with a fast metabolism can healthily eat an amount that is for somebody else “too much,” … Read more

Andy Warhol’s Art of Sloth

“‘Charles,’ said Cordelia, ‘Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?’” “‘Great bosh.’” — Brideshead Revisited   You needn’t be quite so blithe as Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder to know that visual art has gone far astray in the past 100 years. While the works of individual geniuses still arrest us with their idiosyncratic beauty — … Read more

Back to School

In Jerusalem, on the Dome of the Rock — situated on top of what is almost certainly the Holy of Holies, within the ancient Temple precincts — is an inscription, in their earliest angular Kufic script, on what was also the earliest monument the Arabs caused to be erected in a conquered land. It reads, … Read more

A Village Called Wakefield

  Our family has finally called it quits. We’ve folded our tents and abandoned the strip mall and peep show known as American television. We still have the machine in the living room, whereon we can watch Going My Way, with Bing Crosby as the “progressive” Father O’Malley, back when progressive meant that he took … Read more

A Confession

In 1993 I was paid a visit in my home in London by an Irish writer, Colm Toibin, who was gathering material for a book on Catholicism in Europe. Toibin himself had lost his faith and seemed surprised when I told him that I believed not just in God but also in such difficult notions … Read more

Blessed Are the Sweaty

This week I’d like to thank my dogged readers for reading about my dogs, and all the other rococo digressions I squirted onto the page in the course of considering the Seven Deadly Sins and Opposing Virtues, because this week we’re done. Fittingly, since I began the series with Sloth, I put off Diligence to … Read more

Who Art in Heaven

Our Father is not, according to Jesus, merely our Father. He is our Father “who art in heaven.” What does that mean?   Getting at the answer to that in our present culture is harder than you’d think, not least because heaven, says C. S. Lewis, is an acquired taste. There are moments, he writes, … Read more

Is Music Sacred?

As the most immaterial art, music is often thought to be the most spiritual. By its nature, is music sacred? If so, what is sacred about it? These might seem strange questions to ask in a secular age, but the presumption that there is something special about music pervades even our culture.Consider the poster on … Read more

On True Love

Reason speaks in words alone, but love has a song. Joseph de Maistre We live in an age of confusion. It might even be said that we major not only in intellectual confusions but in affective confusions as well. Many do not know how to gauge their emotions; they cannot distinguish between valid and invalid … Read more

Over the Rails America

In this Crisis Magazine classic, Anthony Esolen says a forgotten tourist attraction in rural Pennsylvania can teach us much about the nation we once were, and what we have become.       On a dead-end stretch of what was once U.S. Route 22, in a small village with tacky-friendly billboards boasting “Genuine Dutch Cooking,” … Read more

The Myth of Catholic Art: An Unmanifesto

In this Crisis Magazine classic, painter and art critic Maureen Mullarkey argues that there’s no such thing as uniquely “Catholic art.”   Is there a uniquely Catholic approach to art? What is legitimate Catholic art? How can a Catholic make a significant difference in the artistic community? How should Catholics approach secular art? What might … Read more

Evolutionary Art

It happens to most of us who like classic art: You’re reading an article about some contemporary artist who’s making millions selling “art” made from rumpled beds, carved-up corpses, or human waste, and you ask yourself, why? Why can’t art be heroic and life-inspiring? Why does art have to degrade and shock? And what is … Read more

An Odd Bird

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor Brad Gooch; Little, Brown & Company; 464 pages; $30 Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Flannery O’Connor is that she is fascinating at all. Compared to other 20th-century literary figures, she lived a dull life. She never lost her mind. She didn’t sleep around. She didn’t have a drinking … Read more

Marx and Augustine Find Common Ground

Ever since Candidate Obama remarked that he’d like to “spread the wealth around,” most conservative commenters have concluded that the infiltration of Marxism into our university system has now achieved its long hoped-for effect on American society. “Obama Affinity to Marxists Dates Back to College Days,” read one FoxNews headline. Any number of blogs — … Read more

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