Friday Links
April 11, 2025
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Altarpiece of the Dominicans, Martin Schongauer
Palm Sunday, Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey
Valoree Dowell reading for The Thomist Poets
Joshua Hren: Things Literature and Art Help Us See
Tamara Nicholl-Smith: On Roy Campbell
Katy Carl: When Nobody Reads Anymore: Positionality, Prophecy, and the Artist’s Vocation
Stephen Klugewicz reviews the film 9 April
It’s Time for a Renaissance of Excellence in Catholic Liturgy
The Church’s Hour of Testing – Fr. Donald Haggerty | Catholic Culture Podcast
Valoree Dowell reading for The Thomist Poets
Valoree is a fiction writer and a very good one. She’ll read her work this Sunday evening at 7pm EST. Please join us. You can register at the link above.
Joshua Hren: Things Literature and Art Help Us See
Every few years a variation on this theme can be found in a new study: reading great literature increases empathy; it stimulates sympathies that would otherwise remain dormant, and the novel’s lost significance (and the reading public’s shrinking size) is alarming because we are in dire need of empathy in a polarized age. I want to stake a different claim: that literature, like other arts, helps us only to the extent that it first helps us to see. Any moral or emotional effect of literature (and a fully moral response is both rational and emotional) is secondary to, and consequent upon, literature’s great gift: before they bring us into ethical deliberations, novels and short stories coax us into the realm of natural contemplation.
Tamara Nicholl-Smith: On Roy Campbell
In 1924, this South African poet of Scottish and Irish descent burst onto the London literary scene at age twenty-two. Some eighteen months after the publication of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Campbell’s own six-part, book-length epic poem, The Flaming Terrapin, was both lauded and critiqued for its driving energy and unabating momentum, as well as the flamboyance and force of its splendidly dense imagery. “Its verve and extravagance,” the poet David Wright commented, “burst like a bomb in the middle of the faded prettiness of the ‘Georgian’ poetry then in vogue.”[1] Such praise was not limited to his initial success.
Katy Carl: When Nobody Reads Anymore: Positionality, Prophecy, and the Artist’s Vocation
Until quite recently, the ethos of the writer’s vocation as we understand it has been defined by two parallel but distinct roles, that of prophet and that of craftsman. (For purposes of this essay, the “man” of “craftsman” is the human without direct reference to gender or other category-belonging; this commonplace, apparently throwaway, observation will carry some weight later.) The writer of the kind I mean, the writer with a vocation, is not merely someone who generates blocks of text suitable for utilitarian application to practical or social purposes. Rather, this writer is someone who, whether with few words or many, intends to communicate something from the heart, worth saying, knowing, preserving: something of more importance, greater reach, and higher and deeper validity than either blunt edifices of fact or unmasked expressions of the will to power.
Stephen Klugewicz reviews the film 9 April
How much resistance is a man—and a country—obligated to muster against insurmountable odds? This is the central question of the excellent 2015 Danish film, 9.April, which depicts the invasion of Denmark by the Nazis in the spring of 1940. Based on official reports and eyewitness testimony, including that of several survivors of the Danish armed forces who participated in the one-day war (some of whom are interviewed at the end of the film), the film tells the story of a bicycle infantry company charged with offering the initial resistance to the Nazi advance.
It’s Time for a Renaissance of Excellence in Catholic Liturgy
What does this loss mean? We are seeing it played out before our very eyes: the failure to evangelize the next generation of young Catholics in our pews leading to a cascading decline in Catholic faith and practice, as witnessed by the decline in Mass attendance, marriages, baptisms and religious vocations. At least 40% of adults who say they were raised Catholic have left the Church, Pew Research reported in 2015, and 10 years later, the numbers are not getting better.
Clearly, too many of our next generation of Catholics are not meeting Jesus in the Eucharist. If they were, they would not abandon him to join other religions, or simply to be absorbed by the secular culture. In the oft-quoted line from Sacrosanctum Concilium, the fathers of Vatican II put the importance of the liturgy in our lives as Christians in a wonderfully succinct way:
“[T]he liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows.”
The Church’s Hour of Testing – Fr. Donald Haggerty | Catholic Culture Podcast
A great spiritual master of our time, Fr. Donald Haggerty, joins the podcast to discuss his important new book, The Hour of Testing: Spiritual Depth and Insight in a Time of Ecclesial Uncertainty. He offers profound reflections on the ongoing, and perhaps future, crisis within the Church, with an eye to arousing an appetite for the greater spiritual intensity God desires his faithful to live out in this time. It is essential that we see that our Lord Himself is reliving His Passion in His Mystical Body, when the Church suffers betrayal and humiliation at a high institutional level. It is also essential that we see the high stakes in the great loss of souls in this time, so that we may be spurred to a deeper and more sacrificial prayer life. Fr. Haggerty offers spiritual sobriety and counsels for holiness that should not be missed.
