Category: ANGELUS NEWS

  • RICHARD FLANAGAN’S “QUESTION 7”

    RICHARD FLANAGAN’S “QUESTION 7”

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize-winning novelist, was raised and lives in Tasmania.

    His new book, “Question 7” (Knopf, $28), takes its title from a metaphysical puzzle posed in a short story by Russian writer Anton Chekhov:

    “Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave Station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach Station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach Station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?”

    Chekhov’s point is that the writer’s job is to ask the deepest questions without purporting to answer them.

    In a family memoir that weaves together the romance between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, the development of the atom bomb, and his father’s internment as a Japanese POW, some of the questions Flanagan asks include: Who owns the truth? Is there a final accounting? If there’s no one left to remember that a particular incident happened — the brutal torture inflicted by a group of camp guards; the incineration of a city and its people — does that mean the incident never happened?

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • VISIONARIES

    VISIONARIES

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    I’ve developed a soft spot for those people we hear of from time to time who see Christ in a tortilla, Mary’s face in the trunk of a sycamore, the baby Jesus in the condensation of a hospital window.

    In Protestant New England, where I come from, we had little regard for such phenomena. “Malarkey,” the grownups might have snickered, then doggedly continued chopping wood, hauling lobster traps, or canning peaches.

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • FINDING THE BEAUTY IN A MAN AND HIS “CLUTTER”

    FINDING THE BEAUTY IN A MAN AND HIS “CLUTTER”

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Rosamond Purcell (b. 1942) is a Boston-based photographer and writer whose domains are the palimpsest melding of past, present, and future; the natural and the man-made; the wonder and mystery of decay.

    Raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts — her father was a professor of Byzantine history and Victorian literature — she’s spent much of her life in the dim back rooms of natural history museums.

    In “Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals” (Mariner Books, $16.68), she writes: 

    “As a sojourner, I relish the random search: wandering through miles of corridors, opening hundreds of heavy doors, and choking through fumes, dust, and dark to find the holy grail.”

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

    A huge thank you to all the many readers who responded to my call for Credible Witnesses: I so appreciate each and every one of you. I tried to respond to each person individually, but if I somehow missed you, my apologies.

  • LET NOT OUR HOPE BE PUT TO SHAME: THE 2025 WILDFIRES

    LET NOT OUR HOPE BE PUT TO SHAME: THE 2025 WILDFIRES

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of the spiritual classic “Man’s Search for Meaning,” wrote:

    “Dostoevsky said once, ‘There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.’ These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”

    Catholicism is tailor-made to make us worthy of our suffering: past, present, and future. Whether our transmission just went out, or our house just burned down, we’ve been welcomed into and united with the suffering of Christ, which is to say the suffering at the heart of all mankind: the lame, the blind, the leper, the poor in spirit.

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • THE SMARTEST MAN ALIVE

    THE SMARTEST MAN ALIVE

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    One of the people culture maven and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell profiled in his 2008 blockbuster “Outliers: The Story of Success” (Back Bay Books, $11.64) is a man named Chris Langan, who supposedly has the highest IQ in the world.

    This record has since been disputed but at the very least, we can agree that the man is very, very smart.

    Langan grew up poor, had an abusive stepfather, and even after educating himself to the skies in philosophy, physics, mathematics, and linguistics, had been unable to achieve mainstream success. Here was a man “with a one-in-a-million mind, and he had yet to have any impact on the world,” noted Gladwell.

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • ART IS FOR INCREASING LIFE

    ART IS FOR INCREASING LIFE

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    From a recent essay in “Salmagundi,” a literary journal published at Skidmore College, titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art,” by William Deresiewicz: 

    “Art is for increasing life. That, I believe, after all the other purposes receive their due, is really what it’s for — why we revere it, why we give our hearts to it. What do I mean by increasing life?… Being fully present to the world, and feeling without reservation: the two things that making art requires and that experiencing it involves. … Art is one of the only times when life is anything like being in love. Attention, intensity. …”

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • HANNAH’S CHILDREN

    HANNAH’S CHILDREN

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Author Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, Harvard-trained economist and mother of eight, realized somewhere along the line that “in a two-child world, an eight-child choice begs for an explanation.” 

    The result is a book called “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth” (Regnery Gateway, $24.99). 

    Pakaluk happens to be Catholic but she didn’t choose her family size because the Church decreed it. Our stance on abortion and birth control notwithstanding, as Pakaluk points out, “There’s no doctrine that it’s holier to end up with more kids.”

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • THE PERILS OF LINGUISTIC SUBTERFUGE

    THE PERILS OF LINGUISTIC SUBTERFUGE

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    One of the more disturbing aspects of contemporary life is the co-opting of language by political and cultural ideologues.

    For those of us who subscribe to the Church’s teachings on marriage and family, for example, the twisting of certain concepts, words, and phrases land like chalk going the wrong way up a blackboard.

    One glaring example would be the use of “they” as a singular pronoun, which is a corruption of reality and an egregious offense against those of us who love language, words, and clarity.

    “Reproductive rights” is another such tortured phrase.

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

    A relevant passage from a conversation with journalist Matteo Matzuzzi:

    In so-called ‘public opinion’ we often hear it said that what the Church offers is anachronistic, especially in the fields of moral life and even bioethics. After all, people say, why should we say no to euthanasia if a person suffers? The easier road is the one that is more pleasing. The problem is that many representatives of the Church likewise ask, in the media, whether we haven’t to ‘change’ or ‘reform’ because the message does not find its way to the People of God. What is you opinion? How useful, or how risky, it is to listen to the Zeitgeist?

    The Zeitgeist is a fickle thing! Of course, we must listen out for it: it breathes a message we must take into account. But to seek to follow it is self-defying. By the time we have arrived where it was a moment ago, it has shifted. The Church is by its nature slow-moving. There is a risk that we engage with what we assume are contemporary trends when there is nothing left but dying embers. So we go haplessly, and absurdly, from one extinguished bonfire to the next. It is surely more promising, interesting and joyful to hold fast to what endures. That is what will speak to human hearts and minds in our age as in any age. The Second Vatican Council was marked by the incentive to drink deeply from the sources. The best vitality of Catholic life in the twentieth century sprang from the exhilaration of uncovering forgotten wells, to find the water therein limpid, fresh. What has happened to the exhilaration? Why do we now feel we must abandon the wells in order to set up collapsible stands by vending machines?

  • READING TIPS FOR THE SEASON

    READING TIPS FOR THE SEASON

    Here’s how this week’s arts and column begins:

    People often ask for reading suggestions this time of year. One book I always recommend as we approach Christmas is “The Prison Meditations of Father Delp” (Herder & Herder, $22.98). 

    A Jesuit priest, Father Alfred Delp (1907-1945) wrote with his wrists manacled, largely during Advent, while awaiting execution by the Nazis. A sampling:

    “Life means waiting, not Faust-like grasping, but waiting and being ready. … Anyone who remains stuck, waiting in fearful expectation just to see whether or not he will survive, has not yet laid bare the innermost strata. For the fearful expectation was sent to us in order to remove our false sense of security and behind it is this other metaphysical waiting that is part of existence.”

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • CHAPEL IKONS

    CHAPEL IKONS

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    “Chapel Ikons” (Treaty Oak Publishers, $25.29), a book of photographs and meditations, is a collaboration between Austin-based iconographer, landscape and portrait artist John Patrick Cobb and William Y. Penn Jr., Ph.D.

    After a series of personal tragedies in 1977-1978 and in existential despair, Cobb moved to the Gulf Coast island of Port Aransas. He structurally and artistically restored an old seaman’s chapel there — known as The Chapel in the Dunes — that, in spite of several subsequent hurricanes, still stands.

    A turning point occurred with his arrival in the early 1980s at Austin’s St. Edwards University and the connections he formed there with the Brothers of the Holy Cross. He discovered a spiritual community and a way of living that continues to shape him to this day.

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

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  • SOLZHENITSYN’S MASTERPIECE “MATRYONA’S HOUSE”

    SOLZHENITSYN’S MASTERPIECE “MATRYONA’S HOUSE”

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    In February 1945, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the Russian prison camps. Passages in letters to a friend had been found by military censors to be insufficiently respectful of Stalin.

    After his “rehabilitation,” in 1959 he wrote perhaps his best-known and most well-loved story: “Matryona’s House.”

    It begins like this:

    “For at least six months after the incident took place every train used to slow down almost to a standstill at exactly a hundred and eighty-four kilometres from Moscow. The passengers would crowd to the windows and go out onto the open gangway at the end of the carriages to find out whether the track was under repair or if the train was ahead of schedule. But these were not the reasons for the delay. 

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • “LUMEN” AT THE GETTY

    “LUMEN” AT THE GETTY

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Run, don’t walk, to “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light” at the Getty through Dec. 8. You could easily spend the whole day contemplating this beautifully curated, fascinatingly thought-provoking exhibit.  

    “Lumen” is part of the “PST ART: Art and Science Collide” series currently mounted at various sites around LA. Special installations by Pasadena-based Helen Pashgian and Charles Ross, both artists who explore light and space, extend “Lumen” throughout the museum. 

    An essay entitled “A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects” sets the tone:

    “To be human is to crave light. We rise and sleep according to the rhythms of the sun, and have long associated light with divinity.” 

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • ALL SAINTS, SUNG AND UNSUNG

    ALL SAINTS, SUNG AND UNSUNG

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    When I told a lapsed friend several years ago that I’d published a book about St. Thérèse of Lisieux, she rather pointedly inquired, “But you don’t have to be inside the Church to be a saint, do you?”

    I understood her concern; one of my abiding obsessions is the “unsung saint”: the person who is never noticed.

    In fact, I write a monthly column for Magnificat Magazine called Credible Witnesses that celebrates a notable Catholic who has died but has not yet, and may never be, canonized. But here’s why saints are compelling: Saints are exceptional. Saints are extreme. As William James observed in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, $7.85): “There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric … It would profit us little to study this second-hand [i.e. conventional, ordinary] religious life. We must make search rather for … individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.”

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • TRAVELS IN VENICE

    TRAVELS IN VENICE

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:

    Venice is a city founded in A.D. 421 that exists entirely on water, whose streets and alleys have hardly changed in centuries, and is navigated either on foot or by little boats called vaporettos that zip along the canals.

    It’s as if a tiny corner of the world had been dipped in resin around the turn of the 16th century and has been slowly, picturesquely deteriorating ever since.

    Whole libraries have been written about its history, buildings, art, palace intrigues, and near hallucinatory effect on visitors.

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.