Deep Down Things
Nicodemus, Doug Weaver
Pentecost 2012 issue.
December 24: Happy Birthday Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia, distinguished poet, critic, cultural observer, and Catholic, was born Christmas Eve in 1950. In the midst of an extraordinary career in which he has achieved widespread recognition and active sales of his poetry collections, a rare achievement for living poets, he continues to work towards another kind of success—seeking to bring not only poetry (which is much neglected these days) but also the work of fine Catholic writers back into the mainstream culture.
An Urgent Appeal for Your Help
O Magnum Mysterium, everyday objects, and the nativity
The inspiration for Morten Lauridsen’s masterwork, the Christmas motet O Magnum Mysterium.
“Saint Joseph seeks a lodging at Bethlehem” illustrated, with notes by James Tissot
Joseph Seeks a Lodging at Bethlehem by James Tissot
Friday Links
December 23, 2022
Fourth week of Advent
“Let your heart be the manger that welcomes the holy Stranger”
+A.M. Juster’s 2022 book recommendations on the Claremont Review of Books and John Wilson’s A Bookish Christmas is over at First Things
+Christianity Today’s 2023 Book Awards
+Mary Consoles Eve, interview by Joy Clarkson with Sr. Grace Remington
+ Chesterton Carol
+O Antiphons
War and Peace, and Advent
A character from Tolstoy’s classic recalls the beauty of the Incarnation.
O Antiphons in O Come, O Come Emmanuel
O antiphons for December 17 through 23
Friday Links Are Back! 12/16/22
+”The Hymn of Juan Diego,” a poem for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe by James Matthew Wilson
+A new verse translation of St Ambrose’s Advent Hymn by E.J. Hutchinson in First Things
+Wiseblood Books 2023 anticipated publications and a Christmas discount
Hillsdale College Chapel Choir singing O Little Town of Bethlehem
+Paul Pastor’s challenge to Christian writers from Ekstasis
+The Merry Beggars: An Audio Advent Calendar recording of A Christmas Carol
Though Advent is a penitential season, the Church, in her wisdom, dapples these four weeks of waiting with feast days. Hopefully, on the first major feast of the season, Saint Nicholas’ Day, you awoke to find your shoes overflowing with chocolates. If not, this week’s Friday Links should fill your heart with delight and an ever growing gratitude for the beauties of this world.
Emulating Divine Creation
Philip Guston’s Third Act
Europe in These Times: Los Reyes Católicos
Exploring the churches of Granada with Kevin Duffy
Of Humans and Kingfishers
How Man’s Final End Transcends the Created Cosmos
A private work of love
Celebrating the unheralded works of art that are far more meaningful than we think.
Hildegaard and the female voice
Denise Trull interviews Nori Fahrig, director of the women’s schola Polyhymnia, on the beauty and meaning of the female voice.
Europe in These Times: Rome of the North
Trier is often called the “Rome of the North” because of its large number of typical ruins from the time of that empire, including those of an amphitheater, baths, and—most visibly and uniquely—the fully intact and massive gate that once served as its entry point. This last is the Porta Nigra, dark and ominous at the end of a common pedestrian shopping street, a sentinel that still reminds the visitor that this was once a guarded place, where conquerors built and lived behind walls.
Native American Devotion at Mission Carmel Ruins
What Robert Louis Stevenson Saw at Mission Carmel on the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo November 4, 1879
Invisible Boy
Elizabeth Leon peers through the tension of the visible and the invisible into the mysterious communion of saints.
My mother’s apricot jam
To me, like some third grade eucharistic ritual, my mother was the apricot jam. I wasn’t just eating a sandwich. I was eating the bread of my mother, eating her energy, her effort, her stigma of being the only working mom in my class, a mom who didn’t fit in with the tall blonde women in their designer clothes and fancy cars in the drop-off line. I noticed the grace and fire with which she moved through that cutthroat world and I loved her for it with every part of me.
A Swim in the pond in the rain
A “craft” approach to Great Books
The 2023 J. F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction is Open for Submissions!
The 2023 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction is Open for Submissions!
A gaze that cannot look away
Denise Trull on how romance dwells in the realm of particulars.