Friday Links
April 5, 2024
Christ and Two Followers on the Road to Emmaus by Alonso Cano
Tom Holland recalls inexplicable healing from cancer after praying to Our Lady
The Disenchantment of the World by Byun-Chul Han
Melina Moe: There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters
Light and Hope: William Tate reviews Jane Greer’s poetry
Carina Hodder: Substitute for Virtue
Tom Holland recalls inexplicable healing from cancer after praying to Our Lady
Well, I’ve had a week (illness, no internet, earthquake!) so it was nice to read this story about Tom Holland’s “inexplicable healing from cancer.”
He picked the image up and beheld “the great wings of Gabriel sweeping backwards as he knelt before the Virgin”.
He described the feelings of the next few moments as ones of being in a “thin place” where the veil between our own world and potential realities beyond was more translucent.
“And I felt it was one of those thin places people talk about where the dimension of the heavenly suddenly seems incredibly close,” he revealed.
Mr Holland said that he felt strongly in this location the sense that something much like angels’ wings were brushing past his shoulders as they ascended and descended from other realms.
“It was a kind of sweet sense of intoxication,” he told Justin Brierley at the LICC, suggesting that his experience could have been due to dehydration but that he couldn’t dismiss its possible supernatural origin altogether.
“Perhaps everything was weird and strange. And the moment you accept that there are angels, then suddenly the world just seems richer and more interesting,” he said.
The Disenchantment of the World by Byun-Chul Han
Today, we primarily perceive the world with a view to getting information. Information has neither distance nor expanse. It cannot hold rough winds or dazzling sunshine. It lacks auratic space. Information therefore de-auratizes and disenchants the world. When language decays into information, it loses its aura. Information is the endpoint of atrophied language.
Melina Moe: There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters
Regardless of destination, Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism. The letters themselves—generally one, two at most, exchanged with a given writer—constitute an asymmetrical archive. On one end of each communiqué is the ghost of a submitted manuscript (absent from the archive after being returned to the sender, although in some cases survived by a cover letter). On the other is a rejection from Morrison, sometimes brusque yet typically offering something more than an expression of disinterest—notes on craft, character development, the need for more (or less) drama. But also: Autopsies of a changing, and in many ways diminishing, publishing industry; frustrations with the tastes of a reading public; and sympathies for poets, short story writers, and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres.
Light and Hope: William Tate reviews Jane Greer’s poetry
In his review of her two poetry collections, William Tate finds Jane Greer a “worthy companion” to John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Please do read the whole thing and order Jane’s books if they are not already on your shelves.
Carina Hodder: Substitute for Virtue
The case of Father Marko Rupnik, accused of the psychological and sexual abuse of multiple religious sisters over the course of three decades, has prompted a discussion in the Church about the relation between sacred art and the sanctity (or otherwise) of its artists. Is it right to display art in consecrated places whose creator has a “sexual obsession [which] was not extemporaneous but deeply connected to his conception of art and his theological thought”? If the Church were to commission a process of synodal listening on the matter, it would likely find that the answer to which we have all been journeying together in missionary faith is a huge and resounding “no.” But beneath the issue of art and artists, the Rupnik case presents us with a yet more fundamental question: one concerning the role of Catholics who exercise charisms in the life of the Church, and the communities in which they are formed.
