The best moral formation often comes from music. It was my first year singing in our Dominican Schola and I was learning the intricate beauty of polyphony. A more seasoned brother leaned over and let me know that I’d really “internalized the tempo.” “Great!” I thought to myself, “I’m getting the hang of this.” My face must [...]
Jimmy Carter was a nice, good man who epitomized American Christianity’s reduction to Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. As such, the singing of John Lennon's atheistic "Imagine"—Carter's favorite song—at the former president's funeral was entirely appropriate. Last week at former president Jimmy Carter’s funeral, country singers Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang ex-Beatle John Lennon’s song Imagine, [...]
Poland’s reforms and constitution, Edmund Burke thought, offered real meaning, much closer to the experience of the American Revolution than that of the French Revolution. In significant ways, the Polish king succeeded because he embraced the laws of nature and “the array of Justice” without forcing anything of his own will upon his people. Stanislaw [...]
The positive secular reviews that have come in for my off-Broadway verse drama, "Death Comes for the War Poets," show the power of art to touch hearts even in enemy territory, in the secular art community of New York City, that most “woke” of communities in that most “woke” of cities. This shows the evangelizing [...]
Ridley Scott’s TV adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle came to Amazon in November, and bluntly put, it’s a horrifying ten hours. The premise says it all: What if the Allies had lost World War II? We see America divided between a Nazi regime in the east and a Japanese empire [...]
The Church cannot continue to transform and humanize the world if she dispenses with the beauty of the liturgy. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the [...]
Michael Kurek's English Symphony is his third symphony and perhaps his best, surpassing even the magic and majesty of his second and, as its name suggests, taking the primary world of England as its creative wellspring. When Britain had an Empire The sun would never set, But the sun set over England And Englishmen forget [...]
You see, the poet haunts, casting a spell on the reader or listener. The power of the word in poetic form is nearly incomprehensible. Especially when paired with melody, the effect is extraordinary. This means that a songwriter, a hundred years down the road, having read only small, peripheral portions of his poetry, and having [...]
Both Pyotr Tchaikovsky (in 1840) and Johannes Brahms (in 1833) were born on May 7. That little coincidence didn’t help endear Brahms or his music to Tchaikovsky, however, as the Russian called the German “a conceited mediocrity” and “a giftless bastard.” But then one New Year’s Day, the two men met at a dinner and [...]
God is always there, searching us out, and he is always saying, “Where are you?”, not because he does not know where we are, but because we do not know where we are, nor where we are going when sin and shame make us run from the only One who can heal us. Could have [...]
Plato argues that music is a moral law that gives soul to the universe and wings to the mind. And that music gives flight to the imagination, charm to sadness, gaiety to life and is the essence of order and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful. Is Plato right that musical [...]
If Christmas is anything, it is a revolution of the heart against the tit-for-tat of this world, against the demands of this world for balancing the scales and righting every wrong with a hard justice. Ultimately, if this world is saved, it will be mercy, not justice, that saves it. I. When the Outlandish Is [...]
Arcangelo Corelli was a giant of the Baroque era of Western music and, though it might be easy to forget today, one of the most historically important and popular composers who ever lived. His "Christmas Concerto" has endured as his most popular work and one of the great classical pieces for the Christmas season. [...]
Constantino Brumidi’s fresco is less a deification of George Washington than it is a creative recording of his achievements and his legacy for our nation’s politicians. That the U.S. possesses its own rich history in art and boasts a series of internationally acclaimed painters is no surprise. Indeed, a walk through the Art Institute of [...]