“We are userers whenever we make demands upon others as a return for our actions or gifts; whenever we say or subtly feel that we are owed something or by life itself.”
ANGELUS NEWS
SAINTS ALIVE!
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: Pasadena native Mary Lea Carroll has written two engaging books on saints. The first, Saint Everywhere: Travels in Search of the Lady Saints, came out in 2019. In it, she travels among other places to Siena (St. Catherine), Prague (Infant Jesus) and Medjugorje (Our Lady of […]
ARCOSANTI
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins: Arcosanti has been called an “experimental city,” ” an “urban laboratory,” a “caravanserai.” Seventy miles north of Phoenix, the 25-acre compound, built on a 4,060-acre land preserve, rises from the desert like a mirage. The project was the brainchild of “visionary” Paolo Soleri (1919-2013). Arcology—a concept combining […]
BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: During COVID, I’ve been trying to spend more time in prayer. In particular, I’ve tried to devote fifteen minutes, each day for a week, to meditating on a particular Gospel passage. The first week the Parable of the Rich Young Man [Matthew 19:16-22] bubbled up from […]
A VOCATION OF WATER: HOW ONE MAN IS BRINGING NEW LIFE TO EL SALVADOR
“El Salvador is an amazing country. Its nickname is ‘the little flea of Latin America’ because it’s so small. But the microcosm of the cosmos is here in this little country.”
“This is home now for my family, for me. Water extrapolated to conflict resolution extrapolated to the Kingdom of God.”
LOTUSLAND
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: Madame Ganna Walska (1887-1984) was the type of Southern Californian eccentric over whom people from back East love to roll their eyes, muttering “land of the fruits and the nuts.” Born Hanna Puacz in Brest-Litovsk, Poland, she was an opera singer who was married six times. […]
THE CELLIST: GREGOR PIATIGORSKY
Violinist Isaac Stern recalls watching Piatigorsky maneuver a cello through a narrow corridor of orchestral musicians. “He would hold it at shoulder height, straight ahead, as he walked—a magnificent gesture and a lesson to me in the need to establish a certain character of one’s own when coming onstage.”
THE FOUR QUADRANTS OF CONFORMISM
Graham’s thesis is that passively conventionally-minded are the largest group and the aggressively independent-minded (among whom he clearly counts himself) are the smallest.
We would probably all like to count ourselves among the independent-minded. But how deeply have the purportedly independent-minded in our culture truly thought?
KIMSOOJA
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: A little of “performance art” can often go a very long way. So when a friend sent me an Art21 video by a Korean-born female artist named Kimsooja, I steeled myself. The adoption of a single name—Michelangelo! Madonna! Prince!—I did not take as a good sign. […]
DIGNITY AND JUSTICE: UNPACKING IMMIGRATION LAW
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins: Linda Dakin-Grimm grew up Catholic, first in Riverside, then in Portland, Oregon. In college, she moved away from the faith, then became an attorney and for decades worked as a trial lawyer in high-stakes business litigation. She was partner in a prestigious firm, with offices in […]
HORACE PIPPIN
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: I first came upon the painter Horace Pippin on a trip several years ago to Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, an art collection and educational institution boasting one of the world’s greatest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modernist paintings. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), a wealthy businessman with cash to […]
BIRDS AT THE BASIN
“Follow the trail leading from the ‘stonehenge’ restroom/amphitheatre area south,” the directions run. “You can walk all the way down to the LA River, but if you do (the trail leads through a tunnel under Burbank Blvd.) be sure to go with another person.”
Naturally, I skipped over that last part.
ART WORTH DYING FOR: JAMES DICKSON INNES
Born in Llanelli, Innes studied at Carmarthen Art School and the Slade. A colleague there noted that he ‘was of middle height, black haired and thin featured, handsome to many people… there may have been something satanic in his look.”… He was already dying of tuberculosis, having been diagnosed at 21.
THE EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA OF MASKING
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: “If you invest in the marriage of the inner and outer worlds by putting honest energy into dreaming a dream on, all the people in your life, maybe the whole of humankind, is enriched, though it may not produce the result your ego was seeking. This […]