Coleridge is a monthly digest of noteworthy items in theology and the arts.
Music
Compared to the music of Haydn and Mozart, that of Dieterich Buxtehude is “earlier and earthier, with a sense of spiritual mystery and wonder at the order and workings of the cosmos” (The Imaginative Conservative). Sergei Rachmaninoff was a faithful Orthodox Christian (Washington Examiner). An “electrifying” recording of James Brown “ignited [the] religious imagination” of Matt Austerklein, inspiring his interpretation of the Jewish High Holidays liturgies (Beyond the Music).
The Benedict XVI Choir and Orchestra are releasing a new recording of Frank La Rocca’s Requiem for the Forgotten-Messe des Malades (Cappella Records), and Victoria Emily Jones reviews recordings of Celtic, jazz, and choral vespers (Art and Theology).
“Opera was sheer depravity, witchcraft so strong it crossed language barriers—a foul and foreign vice only Catholics could have devised,” writes Dana Gioia (The Hudson Review). The true purpose of ballet might be “movement as ‘physical prayer,’ an offering of self to something greater” (The Hedgehog Review). A silent disco held in Canterbury Cathedral has met with protests (The Guardian and The Critic).
Cinema
The Nigerian film industry’s fascination with the occult is set against a background of thriving Pentecostalism (New Lines Magazine). Sacred Alaska is a new documentary about the interweaving of Eastern Orthodox traditions and indigenous beliefs (YouTube). Inshallah a Boy tells the story of a Muslim nurse who works for a Christian family in Amman (Too Much Art).
Asteroid City “explores the empathic power of art, the questioning frontiers of science, and the philosophical necessity of religion, while revealing the limited and humble domain of each” (Providence), while Person of Interest examines human-machine tensions in the AI era (Law & Liberty).
About Marlene Dietrich, John Byron Kuhner writes that “Old age is the training God gives us as he prepares us for death, which, if we accept it, can be a glorious homeward journey” (First Things). Joseph Holmes reflects on Oppenheimer and pessimism (Religion & Liberty Online).
Michael Parsons makes a case for the biblical symbolism in Dune (The Symbolic World), Leila Miller denounces the “false Christ” of The Chosen (Crisis Magazine), and Peter Tonguette weighs the balance of ennoblement and depravity in Reacher (Religion & Liberty Online).
In Church Life Journal, LuElla D’Amico writes on Barbie and creation, and Patrick Gray on The Book of Clarence and Gnosticism.
Classic Poetry
David McBride introduces his translation of “Claf Abercuawg,” a ninth-century Welsh poem written from a leper’s point of view (Plough), Langdon Hammer introduces Edgar Garcia’s translations of the Cantares Mexicanos, ghostly voices of a lost civilization (The American Scholar), and Thomas Jacobi introduces The Dazzling Light of God: A Madeleine Delbrêl Reader (Catholic World Report).
Art Kavanagh looks at the relation of matter and spirit in Milton’s Paradise Lost (Talk About Books), Pedro Blas Gonzalez investigates spirit and essence in Wordsworth’s Prelude (Voegelin View), and Daegan Miller writes about the enthusiasm of Transcendentalist mystic Jones Very (Poetry Foundation).
Although cagey about his views, Shakespeare contrasts “naive and instinctive” religion with the “instrumental, hypocritical, and self-interested” variety, writes Theodore Dalrymple (New English Review). Dante’s Virgil is a good model for college professors to follow (Front Porch Republic).
Contemporary Poetry
“Attention is the only path to mystery” (Commonweal), and “The degree to which one engages in prayer coincides with one’s capacity for poetry” (Word on Fire).
Gerald O’Collins remembers the relationship between Seamus Heaney and Peter Steele, the “Australian George Herbert” (Quadrant). Helen Rouner reflects on Auden and mortality (Commonweal). Richard Michelson’s Sleeping as Fast as I Can is full of Jewish spiritual humor and heartbreak (The Jerusalem Post).
James Matthew Wilson interprets John Finlay’s Catholic critique of modern Gnosticism (Catholic World Report) and discusses his own new poem “Obsessed” (Shadowlands Dispatch). Sally Thomas compares J.A. Baker and Gerard Manley Hopkins on birds (Poems Ancient and Modern).
New reviews include Tessa Carman on Claude Wilkinson’s Soon Done with the Crosses (Fare Forward), Jeffrey Bilbro on Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone (Front Porch Republic) Ian Olson on Wiman (Mockingbird), Alex Taylor on David Craig’s Jesus in the Minnows: A Catholic Beat Memoir (The University Bookman), David Deavel on two books by Regina Derieva (The Imaginative Conservative), and Ethan McGuire on To Heaven’s Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Christian Poetry (Voegelin View).
Classic Fiction
At The Homebound Symphony, Alan Jacobs writes about the relationship between law, freedom, repetition, and suffering in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, and the enormous power that a single copy of Thomas a Kempis holds within the narrative of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Tara Isabella Burton reflects on original sin and the striving for “originality” in an 1876 French short story (Luke Burgis).
The Genealogies of Modernity podcast presents a dialogue between Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace on modernity, with responses by Daniel Zimmerman, Katy Carl, and Luke Foster. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has a warning against immortality (Law & Liberty).
Dostoevsky’s The Idiot has a sober Christian hope for eucatastrophe (The Unexpected Journal), and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin offers a prophecy of love against malaise and acedia (Voegelin View).
In the merciless, feudal world of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, a priest says, “It’s not enough to be good. Sin is wrong. And to get rid of it, you have to be tough, even ruthless” (The Nation).
Bonnie Lander Johnson and Julia Meszaros argue for the recovery and relevance of lost Catholic women novelists (First Things), Walker Percy refutes Carl Sagan’s naïve scientism (New English Review), and Christopher McCaffery surveys the work of Gene Wolfe (The Lamp). Bernard Malamud’s novels and stories are classics of Jewish Americana (The Nation).
In Law & Liberty, Tyler Hummel reviews Mark Noll’s C.S. Lewis in America and Henry T. Edmondson III reviews The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Andrew Seeley regards The Lord of the Rings as “a song of merciful Providence” (Arts of Liberty). The widespread “grimdark” school of fantasy writing is a reaction against Tolkien’s overwhelming legacy (The Critic).
The canon offers students “what they really need, namely, a coherent whole, a meaningful past, a lofty universe that will make them proud to join” (Public Discourse).
Contemporary Fiction
Marilynne Robinson introduces her new book, Reading Genesis, in Commonweal; she is interviewed in The New York Times Magazine, and the book is reviewed in The Atlantic. Alice McDermott’s new novel, Absolution, is reviewed in Commonweal and The New York Review.
Peco Gaskovski is interviewed about his novel Exogenesis: “Blade Runner meets the Amish” (Catholic World Report).
In Flannery O’Connor’s sacramental theory of fiction, Trevor Cribben Merrill found a solution to the novelist’s problem of mimetic desire (Writing Fiction After Girard). Rose Lyddon reviews Tara Isabella Burton’s Here in Avalon (Cracks in Postmodernity), and Louis Markos reviews Winston Brady’s The Inferno (The Imaginative Conservative).
Architecture
At Theopolis, the dialogue on architecture and urbanism initiated by Philip Bess continues with contributions from Peter Leithart, Eric Ivers, Matthew Niermann, and Susannah Black Roberts.
An exhibition about Notre Dame de Paris is at Westminster Abbey (Catholic Herald). John Hutton’s glass engravings at Guildford Cathedral have been damaged by vandals (English Cathedrals). The synthronon is a distinctive feature of early church architecture (Liturgical Arts Journal).
Amanda Patchin reviews Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building (Front Porch Republic), Witold Rybczynski remembers Radoslav Zuk, architect of many Ukrainian Catholic churches in Winnipeg, and Andrew Cusack points to Whitechapel Library as a suitable reuse for a former church building.
The Chora Church in Istanbul will become a mosque (The Sacred Images Project and Catholic World Report). Africa’s largest mosque has been opened in Algiers, with an 869-foot minaret, a prayer room for 120,000 people, and library space for 1 million books (Associated Press).
Classic Art
Ioana Belcea explores the richness of Anglo-Saxon liturgical manuscripts (Dappled Things), Charles Barber reviews Africa and Byzantium in New York (The Burlington Magazine), and Victoria Emily Jones reviews Ethiopia at the Crossroads in Baltimore (Art and Theology).
Melody Bellefeuille-Frost meditates upon ‘Our Lady of the Snows,’ a Jesuit hanging scroll made in Japan around the year 1600 (ArtWay). “Why does stained glass make us so happy?” asks Nicole Kliest (Coveteur).
For his 250th birthday, Caspar David Friedrich is reviewed by Peter E. Gordon (The New Statesman) and Catherine Hickey (The Art Newspaper). Arthur Aghajanian praises William Blake (Plough) and Armenian civic sculpture (The Hedgehog Review).
Curator Koen Bulckers highlights Rembrandt’s Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem in a Dublin exhibition (Apollo). Other new Old Master exhibitions include Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Holbein.
Two 18th-century Cuzco School paintings have been returned to Peru (Manhattan District Attorney’s Office), and Westminster Abbey has agreed to return a sacred tablet to Ethiopia (The Guardian). The Colossus of Constantine has been reconstructed in Rome (artnet), Orsanmichele has reopened in Florence (The Florentine), and a Cimabue fresco has been restored in Assisi (Aleteia).
Contemporary Art
Jonathan Anderson reviews Faith in Art, by former Artforum editor Joseph Masheck, which treats the work of “An Orthodox Kandinsky, a Protestant Mondrian, a Catholic Malevich, and a Jewish Lissitzky” (Artforum).
Kathleen Carr discusses the Catholic Art Institute and its Sacred Art Prize (National Catholic Register). Benedictine College has a call for paintings of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, and Christian Art will award £25,000 for the inaugural Laudamus Prize.
The Artistic Sphere: The Arts in Neo-Calvinist Perspective has been published by IVP Academic, and the journal Image is closing after 35 years.
Hannah Rose Thomas introduces Tears of Gold, her portraits of Rohingya, Yazidi, and other women survivors of violence (Plough and Culture Care), and Otto Dam mediates on Silvia Dimitrova’s painting of Miriam (ArtWay). Black iconographer Mark Doox has published a new book of his work (The New York Times).
Hilary White explains philokalia, the love of beauty (The Sacred Images Project), and David Clayton contrasts two approaches to painting the Christian story (The Way of Beauty).
Critical reflections on AI and art are offered by David Clayton, Daniel Mitsui, and Joseph Pronechen.
In Los Angeles, The Fowler Museum has a survey of contemporary Sikh art (ARTnews) and the Getty Center’s exhibition Blood combines medieval and modern works (The Art Newspaper).
Salustiano Garcia’s painting of Jesus, made for Seville’s Holy Week, has attracted protests (The Pillar), and Hilary White critiques the “soulless” work of artist Marko Rupnik (The Sacred Images Project).
