Friday Links, February 5, 2021

Dr. Anthony Esolen on “Straightening the Crooked,” tonight; Reminder: Josephine Bakhita Benefit for Survivors of Sex Trafficking; Reminder: Catholic Literary Arts Lenten competition deadline; CLA ekphrastic poetry competition submissions open; Dana Gioia on Cheever’s unforgettable voice—and personna; David Clayton and Fr. Michael Rennier on how to form children to resist the dangers of the Internet.

Friday Night Lecture Reservation: Dr. Anthony Esolen on “Straightening the Crooked: Purgatory as Spiritual Infirmary”

Dappled Things Contributing Editor, Fr. Michael Rennier shared this event.

THIS FRIDAY: February 5, 2021
4:30 PM PST, 5:30 PM MST, 6:30 PM CST, 7:30 PM EST
Poet and Educator Dr. Anthony Esolen will talk at Magdalene College’s Friday Night Lecture (an online event)

Register to attend. A few hours prior to the live online event, you will receive information via email on how to attend from your computer.

Dana Gioia remembers a week with John Cheever at Stanford: “I was stunned by his voice.”

Katy Carl also recommends this article at The Book Haven “blog for the written word,” by literary biographer Cynthia Haven at the Stanford University website.

In his new book of recollections: Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life, [Dana Gioia,] the former National Endowments for the Arts chairman recalls his all-too-brief week with Cheever. ‘I was dazzled by his talk which could make a mortgage or a report card shimmer like a sacred script.’

The book, published by Paul Dry Books, has the distinction of being one of the few books ever to go into a third printing before it was officially out, thanks to pre-orders.”

Using Sacred Art to Form Children to Resist the Lure of the Internet

Fr. Michael Rennier also shared the above link with the comment, “I thought this was insightful. I’m writing a response piece for Aleteia.”

In this piece at New Liturgical Movement, artist and educator, David Clayton, writes his opinion that exposure to sacred art can somehow immunize children against disordered imagery, suggesting that by giving them proper formation in sacred images, it  would not then be necessary to restrict their freedom to use the Internet.  He was a conference about classical education and wrote:

A lot of the sidebar chat in the (Zoom) forum focused on the detrimental effect of the internet on education, and of the use of cell phones and tablets on children’s psychological development. . . . It was suggested that the answer was to remove such devices from children in school, even if it meant sacrificing access to good educational tools that the internet might also provide. The argument being made was that traditional classroom pedagogy is the best form of education, and that a good Catholic education would form students in virtue so that as adults, they would be better able and more inclined to choose well and resist temptation.

“As I was listening to the discussion, it occurred to me there is another traditional and focused way to form students’ power to choose images well, by using sacred art.”

Katy Carl replied, “ooh, my kids just lost screens for a week due to some egregious misbehavior and I already didn’t like the role the device had sneakily begun to play in our days so .”  

What do you all think? I think it’s an interesting theory, and I totally agree children should be formed by sacred art, as well as by the Scriptures and uplifting literature, but really there’s no real way to test Clayton’s theory that showing children the good would drive out the temptation to dwell on the bad. You’d have to follow his guidance by faith. You couldn’t do a reliable study without exposing a group of children to the dangers of the Internet—and by giving them that freedom you would risk their being exposed to images that once seen could not be unseen and whose effects could be pernicious.

Fr. Rennier adds: “Here‘s my write-around.”