Friday Links, January 15, 2021

Upcoming Presence Journal preview reading, a Dürer course, a Japanese artist discusses his vocation, a St. Bakhita Benefit for survivors of sex trafficking, a DT editor leaves for the new Chrism Press, and Dali appears again.

Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry

Sunday, January 17 from 7 – 8:30 pm PST

All are invited to an online preview reading of the 2021 issue of Presence (coming out in April). The event will feature poet Rev. Joseph A. Brown, S.J., Ph.D., along with eleven other poets: Don Bogen, Mary Buchinger, Sarah Cortez, George Guida, John Hodgen, Mary Ladany, Sue Fagalde Lick, Megan McDermott, Martha Silano, David Thoreen, and Cindy Veach. Email mmiller@caldwell.edu for the link to attend.

Victoria Martino Art History Lecture Series » Albrecht Dürer

Starting Tuesday, January 19, all are invited to join Harvard-trained art historian, Victoria Martino, for a five-week lecture series to celebrate the 550th birthday year of Albrecht Dürer, who was born May 21, 1471. The series is presented by The Athenaeum Music & Arts Library of La Jolla, CA. You can enroll for the entire series or for individual classes.

For more information on the course content and pricing and on how to register, go here.

The first lecture on “Albrecht Dürer: Early Life and Education” is on January 19 from 6:30 PM 8:00 PM PST.

“Self portrait at 13” by Albrecht Dürer (1484) at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria

Art & Faith: A Theology in the Making

January 21 at 3 pm PST

Margarita Mooney, Founder and Executive Director of Scala Foundation, and Professor of Practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, will discuss with Japanese-American painter Makoto Fujimura “his vocation as a Christian and painter, as reflected on in his recent book, Art and Faith.” The discussion will “address the various ways that Christian thinkers and both Japanese and American thinkers have understood art, worship and culture.”

This event is open to the public, and it will be recorded and placed on Scala’s YouTube channel.

On the Feast of St. Josephine Bakhita, a B16 benefit for survivors of human trafficking

Monday February 8, 2021
5:30 PM PST – 8:30 PM PST

The Benedict XVI Institute is sponsoring an online benefit to help women who are survivors of human trafficking. Josephine Bakhita, who escaped slavery, became both a survivor and a saint.

The event is part of the Benedict XVI Institute’s Year of the Homeless, with a number of related events scheduled throughout the year. This event is to benefit the San Diego charity, Children of the Immaculate Heart, which provides a place of refuge and care for women and children who are survivors of modern-day slavery: human trafficking. For details about the speakers, about the Mass setting for the homeless and the painting of the patron saints of the homeless that have been commissioned by the institute, and to register for this first of several planned events, go here.

Announcing Chrism Press

From Karen Ullo, formerly managing editor of Dappled Things, now co-founder and editor at the Chrism Press:

Hello, Dear Readers! If I’ve been quiet for a while, it’s because I’ve been busy writing, but also launching an exciting new venture called Chrism Press!

Chrism Press is a brand-new imprint of WhiteFire Publishing dedicated to stories informed by Catholic and Orthodox Christianity that may not be able to find a home in either mainstream secular or Christian (Evangelical) presses. . . .

Please help us spread the word to both writers and readers who are interested in great stories told from Catholic and Orthodox perspectives!

Dalí and the Psychology of Sin

Dalí’s Divine Comedy
Dallas Art Museum
Through February 21, 2021

Salvador Dali is back again this week, after his appearance in Friday Links, January 1, 2021 as the designer of some Hallmark Christmas cards that never did become big sellers, because they were so, well, surrealistic, with headless angels and such like.

This perceptive essay about Dali and the psychology of sin by Ben Lima is also about the current “Dalí’s Divine Comedy” exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art. Dali was commissioned to illustrate another religious subject, a new edition of the Comedy in advance of Dante’s 700th birthday in 1965. Dali produced 100 watercolors, one for each canto, which were then skillfully engraved and printed. A complete set of one hundred prints was given to the Dallas Museum of Art, and a selection of fourteen of these prints is now on view in a small second-floor gallery at the DMA, in time for the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in 2021—fifty-six years later.

In his opening illustration for Paradiso, Dalí shows the forms of Dante and his beloved Beatrice facing, and embracing, each other. As their bodies dissolve into scores of shimmering fragments (recalling Dalí’s interest in the ‘mystical’ properties of matter as revealed by nuclear physics), Beatrice’s form is pierced by rays of golden light from above (recalling Bernini’s rendering of St. Teresa). Here Dalí offers the merest glimpse of a transcendence of earthly finitude.”—Ben Lima