Friday Links, February 2, 2018

Mel Gibson's sequel to The Passion of the Christ is moving forward with Jim Caviezel back in the starring role. "‘Braveheart, that’s a film that took a long time to be able to crack,’ Caviezel says. ‘The same thing for Passion. And the same thing for this. He’s finally got it. So that is coming.’"

Lee Oser talks with Crisis Magazine about Comedy and the Catholic Novel. "But yes there are certain taboos that a Catholic writer has to respect, and those did come up in my writing. Samuel Beckett will violate those taboos, and it’s interesting to watch him do it, and I respect Beckett. As a writer, not as a theologian. Without our taboos we lose the sense of who we are, we lose the reality of our emotions. We become more and more vaporous."

How does the progress of technology work against our connection to reality? "The point of the artist is not to trick us, but to delight our imagination. And our imagination is delighted only when the objects of our perception do not fool us into thinking they’re real. Kant argues that ‘beautiful art must look like nature, although we are conscious of it as art.’ Beautiful art must exist as an in-between phenomenon, in which it looks like it’s real, but its audience remains conscious of this ‘like,’ this ‘as if.’"