Friday Links, August 28, 2020

Still catching up on a rich backlog of links.

The Play About America’s First Black Catholic Priest Most Have Never Heard Of

Recommended by Katy Carl, “h/t author Julia Duin, who used to be my neighbor in Maryland!” Julia Duin at “Religion Unplugged” writes about “Tolton: From Slave to Priest,” a play about Augustus Tolton, America’s first Black Catholic priest. Leonardo Defilippis, actor-turned-president of Saint Luke Productions, wrote this play about the former slave in 2017. The play was presented about 200 times in 38 states until March of this year—when theatrical productions shut down because of COVID-19.

After the Black Lives Matter movement exploded in American streets two months later, interest in Tolton ballooned. Dioceses around the country are asking for a performance, live or recorded. The show may even perform for the Black Congressional Caucus.”

“The show is so relevant to what is happening right now,” Defilippis says. “He is one of the most important Black figures in the history of the United States. He is on the track to sainthood. “

Tolton was declared “venerable” – the first step to official sainthood – last year by Pope Francis.

Scruton’s Swan Song: Contemplating Wagner At The End Of Life

Paul du Quenoy at The American Conservative reviews Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption, By Sir Roger Scruton, Allen Lane publisher, May 2020, 146 pages.

In one final posthumous book, Sir Roger sheds brilliant light on one of the composer’s most mysterious works. . . . The late Sir Roger Scruton’s death in January left a yawning gap in the Anglosphere’s intellectual life, but he posthumously helped fill it with his final book, Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption, which appeared a few months later.”

A World of Strange Relations: Christian Wiman’s “Survival Is a Style”

At “Public Discourse,” Sally Thomas writes about Christian Wiman’s last book of poetry.

The voice that speaks in his poems is the voice, as he puts it, of the ‘unbelieving believer,’ who is not separated from those to whom he wishes to ‘say something helpful,’ but is one of them, speaking their language, because—though he believes—it is his native tongue.