Coleridge: Robert Frost’s Numinosity, Don Quixote’s Enchantment, and Ephrem the Syrian’s Poetry

Coleridge is a monthly digest of noteworthy items in theology and the arts.

Music

Frank La Rocca’s Requiem for the Forgotten “stirs the soul” (Classical Music Sentinel and National Catholic Register), and James MacMillan’s “radiant” oratorio Fiat Lux “overwhelms and thrills” (The Times). Dan Hitchens attends the silent disco at Canterbury Cathedral (The Lamp), and Vampire Weekend’s new album is “a journey from cynicism to optimism; from skepticism to faith” (Church Life Journal).

Among the singer-songwriters: Maggie Rogers, after her viral success in music, enrolled at Harvard Divinity School, where she is now a postgraduate fellow (The New Yorker and NPR). John Moreland has produced “one of the most honest and beautiful reckonings with religious disbelief in American culture” (Image). Jeremy Camp’s memoir connects to universal themes of faith and adversity (The University Bookman). Taylor Swift has broken up with the church (Mockingbird). Waxahatchee’s new work has an elusive rootedness and an ancient oddness (Fare Forward).

In his second symphony, Mahler confronted the shock of mortality (The Imaginative Conservative). New reviews of early music include Cantata Collective’s Bach Mass in B-minor and Cut Circle’s Josquin Motets & Chansons (at Early Music America), and The Sixteen’s Masters of Imitation (at Gramophone).

Cinema

Ingmar Bergman found refuge from severe Lutheranism in puppet theater (The Wall Street Journal). Peter Tonguette beautifully eulogizes his late mother, a cinephile (The Lamp). A dialogue on the horror genre includes entries from Justin Lee, Sebastian Milbank, and Zach Parker (Theopolis).

Matthew Tan has an eschatological reading of Pixar’s 2015 Inside Out (Church Life Journal). Timothy Lawrence critiques the Christology of Martin Scorsese’s 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ (The Usual Subjects). John Ehrett follows the theme of transcendence in Darren Aronofsky’s work (First Things). Detective stories, e.g. Columbo, are a “vehicle for questions of cosmic justice” (Mockingbird).

Newly reviewed: Wildcat, Cabrini and Irena’s Vow (The Catholic World Report), and Freud’s Last Session (Religion & Liberty Online). LuElla D’Amico reflects on Cabrini and the place of women in the church (Church Life Journal).

Classic Art

Matthew Milliner’s scintillating column “Material Mysticism” has recently considered Evagrius of Pontus, Apa Aphou of Pemdje, and Midjourney’s AI images (Comment). Michelangelo’s crucifixion drawings are on view in London (The Art Newspaper). A 16th-century Mexican pax has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA Unframed).

Thirteen of the famous “Mays,” 17th-century paintings depicting the Acts of the Apostles, given annually to Notre-Dame by the Paris goldsmiths’ guild and rescued from the 2019 fire, are featured in a new show in Paris (Artnet). Poussin’s Eucharist is now at the National Gallery in London (Catholic Herald).

Angelica Aboulhosn explores Africa & Byzantium, now at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Humanities). Rebuilding Notre-Dame has bolstered French national unity (Der Spiegel). What is to be done with deconsecrated church buildings? (America). Hannah Richardson reviews Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art by Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt (Christian Scholar’s Review).

Contemporary Art

The Vatican’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale is installed in the Giudecca women’s prison (Artnet, The Guardian, National Catholic Reporter). Henri Matisse’s 1947 Chapel of the Rosary was a “spiritual adventure” (Engelsberg Ideas). The Blaue Reiter Expressionist group was concerned with spiritual authenticity (Catholic Herald).

Aliide Naylor profiles Estonian stained-glass artist Dolores Hoffmann (Meduza), Jonathan Evens interviews Matthew Askey about his Stations of the Cross in Hornsea, England (ArtWay), and the Thomas More Centre interviews Daniel Mitsui (video and transcript).

Liturgical Arts Journal appreciates the oil paintings of Raul Berzosa and the illuminated books of Edward Bulley. Image showcases Ed Fraga’s Shofar-Jesu ink paintings, as well as Meridel Rubenstein’s Eden in Iraq and other climate-change-themed art.

Musicologist Julia Dokter reproduces medieval art to learn more about music (Early Music America). Hilary White introduces iconographers George Kordis, Anthony Gunin, and Ivanka Demchuk (The Sacred Images Project).

“Sacred Arts in a Pluralistic Society: An Inter-Religious Conference” will take place online and in person May 21-23 (Vancouver School of Theology). The Bible in Photography, by Sheona Beaumont, is published by Bloomsbury.

Poetry

Robert Frost had “little in the manner of sectarian concerns across his corpus, but his verse was hardly devoid of the theological, of a sense of the numinous” (The Hedgehog Review). James Matthew Wilson surveys the work of John Finlay (The European Conservative), that of David Middleton (The Catholic World Report), and the poetry of death and resurrection (Modern Age). R.V. Young reviews Middleton’s Outside the Gates of Eden (Touchstone).

Maxim D. Shrayer reports on the results of his survey of Jewish poets and translators (Tablet), and Philip Metres and Jessica Jacobs discuss interfaith relations (Image). Joey Jekel interviews Scott Cairns (Ecstatic).

Reviews of new work include Shawn Philip Cooper on Jane Clark Scharl’s Ponds (The Catholic World Report), Mary Grace Mangano on Maryann Corbett’s The O in the Air (Literary Matters), John McEwen on Ned Denny’s Ventriloquise (Catholic Herald), and William Tate on Jane Greer’s two volumes Love Like a Conflagration and The World as We Know It Is Falling Away (Current).

Tessa Carman writes about the fourth-century poetry and creation theology of Ephrem the Syrian (Plough). Recently highlighted at Poems Ancient and Modern: “Love (III)” by George Herbert, “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau” by William Blake, and “Easter Morning” by Joseph Bottum.

W.H. Auden’s The Shield of Achilles, edited and introduced by Alan Jacobs, is published by Princeton University Press.

Contemporary Fiction

Joshua Hren interprets Eugene Vodolazkin’s philosophy of history (Church Life Journal). The Obama-era narrator of Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations has Pentecostal roots (Bookforum). James K.A. Smith reflects on the “haunted realism” of Marie NDiaye (Image).

Novelists Jordan Castro and Nicolette Polek, who are married to each other, are open about their faith. Castro says, “I’ve put my faith in Jesus Christ. And that kind of faith can be a burden” (Calendance), while for Polek, “In 2016, I became a Christian, so a lot of the things I wanted to write about changed” (Interview). Polek’s debut novel Bitter Water Opera is reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and Hobart.

In Current, Christina Bieber Lake reviews Tara Isabella Burton’s Here in Avalon, and LuElla D’Amico reviews Katy Carl’s Fragile Objects. The New York Times has articles on “the queen of Christian fiction,” Karen Kingsbury, the gay Christian characters of Allen Bratton, Daniel Lefferts, and Garrard Conley, and the apocalyptic novels of Ling Ma, Jenny Offill, and Jesmyn Ward.

Classic Fiction

Noël M. Valis writes about Don Quixote: “Cervantes shows us that in so-called ordinary life enchantment lies beneath the surface, in the forms of the imagination, which, disturbingly, also embrace delusion, obsession, and madness” (Modern Age). Joshua Cohen introduces Elias Canetti’s Quixotic Book Against Death (The Paris Review), and Rachel Sequeira reviews Gideon Rappaport’s Christian edition of Hamlet (Fare Forward).

While Cristina Campo developed a “fairy-tale mysticism” in her fiction, she became a solid Latin-Mass traditionalist after the Second Vatican Council (The Baffler). Clarice Lispector’s newly translated The Apple in the Dark is “An inversion of the Genesis creation narrative, the novel is a heretical allegory, one that seemingly undermines the whole architecture of Judeo-Christian morality” (Commonweal). Alan Jacobs reflects on Karl Barth’s appreciative 1939 letter to Dorothy L. Sayers (The Homebound Symphony). Henry James’s view of the afterlife was influenced by Spiritualism (The Hedgehog Review).

According to Gary Saul Morson, “One still astonishing fact about militantly atheist Soviet culture is that three of its greatest literary masterpieces—by Pasternak, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn—were avowedly Christian, and a fourth, Life and Fate by the Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, was equally spiritual” (First Things). Morson also writes about “the Russian idea of good and evil” (Touchstone). Julianna Leachman attempts to practice a Dostoevskian pedagogy (Christian Scholar’s Review).

Jerome C. Foss has reservations about Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage? (Law & Liberty), which will be the subject of an online seminar in June (Collegium Institute). Joel J. Miller reviews Mark Noll’s C.S. Lewis in America (Miller’s Book Review), Isaiah Flair reviews J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters (The University Bookman), and Stefan Kaminski finds a Harrowing of Hell in Tolkien’s Return of the King (Catholic Herald).