Deep Down Things
Nicodemus, Doug Weaver
Pentecost 2012 issue.
Friday Links, August 13 2021
The Necessary Denouement
Every story deserves a proper ending. How one artistic mother deals with empty nest syndrome.
Friday Links, August 6, 2021
Europe In These Times: A Church of Clouds
Art plays on memory in its own way, at its best leaving one with a question, or a thought that cannot be completed, that is failed by words; and so it was with this experience, this day, this lingering sentiment now (and perhaps for a long time) occupying my consciousness: the musical work of a sixteenth century English composer, sung in Latin, arranged by a Canadian artist and placed in the cool white space of an Austrian house of worship, being heard by an itinerant American—art and faith crossing boundaries and centuries
Friday Links, July 30, 2021
+ More about the age-old question: What qualifies a work of fiction as literary art?
+ On the connection between the Benedictine vision and poetry.
+ Raft of Stars novel read chapter by chapter on Wisconsin Public Radio.
+ New Wiseblood Press essay by Michael D. O’Brien, on the history of mankind’s creative imagination.
+ “Dear Holy Father”: some respectful reactions to Pope Francis’ recent motu proprio.
Revenge Literature: Aping the Ape
In an interview from 2020, novelist Alexander Theroux opines that “writing itself is in a very real sense about revenge,” and that “to take on the subject of love as a theme in a book, one cannot avoid the ancillary themes of jealousy, disappointment, and revenge.”
Friday Links, July 23, 2021
Should Rome decide which art is suitable for churches?
Dante’s youthful handwriting discovered in examples of his student copywork.
Why we need stories, to teach morals without moralizing.
What Will It Take to Encourage a Return to Mass?
Do you think they're coming back? They've already been disappearing for years and years and years now. The question is existential.
Held In the Hands of Tradition
It was only a few years after her death, when I was preparing to become a mother myself, that I finally felt able to return to the Church in the way that was intended for me. Catholicism had always made sense on some intuitive level to my way of being in the world, but I’d never conceived of that community as a possibility in the wake of all that Ma had taught me for all my life. The first few months I attended Mass regularly were filled with anxiety, more guilt, and pain as the truth of who I was called to be sharpened into focus ever more clearly in contrast with the woman Ma had always wanted me to be.
Makoto Fujimura’s Ways to God: A Review of Art and Faith
Much of the Christian world simmers, feuds, and fades. What we need to do is start making art in ways that set hearts on fire. We need to reopen the pathways to God.
Terence Sweeney on traveling to God through making
Friday Links, July 16, 2021
Poetry and other publications mostly by present and past Dappled Things staff, and friends.
+ Sarah Cortez’s poem “Green”
+ Rhonda Ortiz’s essay on silence followed by a link to . . .
+ Rhonda Ortiz’s debut novel
+ Word on Fire on liturgical art.
Why the World Needs Amateurs
How one laywoman came to love the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, as seen through the eyes of an amateur. Amateurism is the very definition of creating beauty for the sheer sake of love.
Friday Links, July 9, 2021
+ When woefully underappreciated writer Betty Wahl Powers was mistaken for Flannery O’Connor.
+ Jennifer Fulwiler, former atheist, now well-known Catholic writer, talk show host, and mother of six sparks a new stand-up comic routine in her garage—using her blue flame.
+ An attractive opportunity for a visual artist at Portsmouth Abbey School in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
+ Fr. Damian Ference, at “Word on Fire” writes to answer the question, “Are Modern Men Permitted the Gift of Tears?”
+ Little Gidding Press—Publisher of Poetry and Prose.
Anchor-hold
Mothers inhabit a different sort of time, a different sort of life. I can only rail against it for so long.
Now I choose, what? To accept it. To accept the constraints, to embrace them.
Like monks do.
Friday Links, July 2, 2021
+ Lost in Thought: the Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, interview with author, Zena Hitz.
+ Catholic Artists Directory: where sacred artists can be listed, to help patrons find you.
+ Another review about Kristin Valdez Quade’s The Five Wounds.
I dare you to write a letter
Letters are sensual things. Never have I ever read an email or an instant message that can even come close to holding a letter in my hands.
All In White
Literature and the truth of Religious Life
Friday Links, June 25, 2021
+ Sixth Power of the Word Conference will explore the “call of literature” for authors and readers.
+ About the ways number and logic underlie the entirety of Dante’s Commedia.
+ Congratulations to DT editorial assistant Mary Woods on her first novel!
+ Two Internet novels get us closer to understanding the experience of life online.
Faith Without Awe Is Dead
Poetry trained me to see and to ask better questions. The questions of the cynic are overly simplistic. They are, in a sense, not even questions at all.
The Memory of His Saints
By the time I met her she probably knew more dead people than alive. Although it was only the two of us at the dining room table, the room was rich with ghosts. But it was more than just ghosts. In The Confessions St. Augustine talks about the power of memory: as a power of the soul and as a power that transcends the soul, since its deepest memory is the memory of God