Friday Links
December 1, 2023
St. Edmund Campion
Clare Coffey is Waiting in the Gloom
Matthew Milliner on The Christian Invention of Art
Nick Ripatrazone on Laura Reece Hogan’s Butterfly Nebula
Redeeming the Food Industry by Alex Sosler
Valerie Stivers on The Road to Stella Maris
Beauty Will Make the World: Why You Should Support a Cause That Isn’t Urgent
Clare Coffey is Waiting in the Gloom
But despite the outrages to the noble Halloween, spooky season cannot be kept entirely down. It is the season when walking at night brings a sense of things you cannot name and perhaps do not like you very much. It is relief at the sight of a light gleaming from a human habitation. It is the season of graveyards, of the wet brown leaves rotting in the compost, suffering what they must so that life will return in spring. It is the foreboding of winter. It is the knowledge of your own death, hurtling toward you faster than you would like to admit. Not only your own – it is the season when the earth and everything seen and unseen on the earth turns on you with the same hostile reproach: we are dying, dying, because of you.
Matthew Milliner on The Christian Invention of Art
So, no, the Enlightenment did not invent the idea of art. Instead, it sundered art from the Christian matrix that had long enabled it to flourish, a matrix that—against the secularist’s hope—endures wherever Christian beauty graces institutional walls. As the secular cult of art dries up, the older sacred riverbed on which it flowed is increasingly exposed, which accounts for the irrepressible and ubiquitous discussions about religion in contemporary art today.
Nick Ripatrazone on Laura Reece Hogan’s Butterfly Nebula
One of Hogan’s front epigraphs for the book is Isaiah 62:2: “You shall be called by a new name, / pronounced by the mouth of the Lord.” The first poem, “In Which I Pray for Stars”, likewise begins “Remember me, Lord”. It is a phrase that encapsulates the collection: ardent speakers who wish to affirm the wondrous nature of the world and the divinity of creation. Her subjects are expansive: oceans, space, matter, gravity and “the unseeable fault lines / in the soul.”
Redeeming the Food Industry by Alex Sosler
For full disclosure, The Bear is the first show that I re-watched immediately after finishing. So, I like it. The storytelling is compelling, the character development is surprising and beautiful without being didactic or wooden, and there’s something that hooked me about the low-grade anxiety that you feel throughout the series interrupted by panic-attack-inducing scenes. Perhaps the most memorable episode, called “Fishes,” in Season Two, features a Christmas family dinner. If you’ve ever been to an Italian family meal, the raucous evening will feel familiar – though (hopefully) the tension and outrageous drama of Carmen’s family is not something you’ve personally experienced.
Valerie Stivers on The Road to Stella Maris
When Cormac McCarthy died in June at age eighty-nine, the news touched off grief and adulation such as contemporary literary authors rarely inspire. Musicians, scientists, conservatives, Catholics, all have claimed him. One man circulated and posted the notes he’d taken after a series of phone calls with the author in the early nineties. A woman confessed to having stolen his garbage. As for me, I drove the mountain roads in Vermont this summer, thinking about McCarthy and imagining things. I might learn to can peaches, buy a gun, order iodine tablets, fit a hand pump on the well, dig a root cellar, stock an apocalypse pantry . . .
The response is McCarthy’s due, as he is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest novelists. But it also seems like a demand for a different kind of literary fiction than the kind we currently have, one with concerns Christians will recognize, penned by a different kind of writer.
Beauty Will Make the World: Why You Should Support a Cause That Isn’t Urgent
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