Coleridge is a monthly digest of noteworthy items in theology and the arts.
Art
Pending lectures include, on February 8 in London, “Balthazar: The Third Man Drawn From the Shadows ” (Art+Christianity) and on February 22 in Charlotte and online: “Why Should Christians Care About Abstract Art?” (Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary).
Fr. Silouan Justiniano sketches a curriculum in iconography (Orthodox Arts Journal), and John P. Burgess visits leading Russian iconographer Fr. Zinon (First Things). In Comment, Matthew Milliner takes a four-part tour of Marian devotion in the Midwest U.S., India, Québec, and London. Liturgical objects from Notre-Dame de Paris are on display at the Louvre (Apollo).
James Romaine introduces an Ethiopian illuminated gospel book (ArtWay), and Elena Goukassian tours Ethiopian Culture at the Crossroads, a show at the Walters Museum in Baltimore (The Art Newspaper).
Maev Kennedy reviews a new biography of Irish stained-glass pioneer Michael Healy (The Art Newspaper), Dan Hitchens reviews The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time by Virginia Chieffo Raguin (The Spectator), and the documentary film Holy Frit explores the world of renowned stained-glass maestro Narcissus Quagliata (Too Much Art).
Recently published reflections include Jennifer Newsome Martin on “desiring beauty” (Church Life Journal), Makoto Fujimura on generativity and culture care (Plough), and Fr. Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges on art and morality (St. Jerome’s Workshop).
Meditations on Hugo Van Der Goes’s sublime Portinari Altarpiece are offered by Brian Moats (Theopolis), Kathleen Carr (Catholic Art Institute), and Mary Elizabeth Podles (Touchstone). Podles’s new collection of essays is appreciatively reviewed by Louis Markos (The Imaginative Conservative).
Victoria Emily Jones reviews John Patrick Cobb’s Ikon Chapel (Art & Theology), Simcha Fisher profiles Catholic painter Jaclyn Warren (Our Sunday Visitor), and Amanda Millet-Sorsa reviews Anne Patterson: Divine Pathways at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (The Brooklyn Rail). The Catholic Art Institute has awarded the 2023 honors in its Sacred Art Prize (Catholic Art Institute).
New Renaissance painting exhibitions include Bellini and Giorgione in Munich (Apollo) and in New York (Too Much Art), the “forgotten” Francesco Pesellino in London (The Art Newspaper), and Guido Reni’s portrait of St. Philip Neri at the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption in Covington, Kentucky (New Liturgical Movement).
John-Paul Stonard considers R.B. Kitaj’s status as a Jewish painter (London Review of Books). Gary Schwartz announces a new book on Rembrandt Seen Through Jewish Eyes (Amsterdam University Press). Mireia Castano Martinez reviews The Lost Mirror: Jews and Conversos in Medieval Spain at the Prado (The Burlington Magazine). The MFA Houston has opened a permanent gallery of Judaic art (Houston City Book), and the Ben Uri Gallery has a show about exile and migration in biblical images.
Architecture
Richard of St. Victor’s commentary on Ezekiel was foundational for the practice of architectural drawing, writes Karl Kinsella (Aeon), author of a new book on the subject (MIT Press).
Norman Wirzba writes that architecture should honor, celebrate, and nurture life (Plough).
The canonization cause for Antoni Gaudí, architect of the Sagrada Familia, has advanced (Catholic News Agency).
The decline of ornament is a loss for architecture (The American Scholar).
Liturgical Arts Journal visits churches in ancient Myra, Baroque Venice, and modern Rome.
Buddhism in India gave rise to gardens, not monasteries (Psyche).
Contemporary Fiction
In his Nobel Prize lecture, Jon Fosse stated that “it is only in the silence that you can hear God’s voice. Maybe.” For the occasion, The New York Times published appraisals of Fosse’s work by Christopher Beha and Alex Marshall. Fosse’s latest novella, A Shining, is reviewed by Joshua Hren (First Things).
Cormac McCarthy’s late novels are suffused with the threat of an apocalypse (The Point), Eugene Vodolazkin’s fiction envisions tikkun olam, “the repair of the world” (Plough), and Bill Watterson’s The Mysteries laments the fact of transience (The New York Review).
Katy Carl appreciates Andrew McNabb’s Walking with Father Vincent and Inspirations & Lamentations (Fare Forward).
Classic Fiction
In his new biography of Willa Cather, Benjamin Taylor writes that the author “felt sorry for unbelievers, classing them with vegetarians, pacifists, and other crackpots” (The Washington Free Beacon). A.H. Winsnes writes about Sigrid Undset’s Christian realism (The Imaginative Conservative), and Paul Baumann about Mary McCarthy’s Catholic education (Commonweal).
D.H. Lawrence’s understanding of sexual liberation was prophetic (First Things). Gary Saul Morson explores “why Dostoevsky loved humanity and hated the Jews” (Mosaic), and Ryan Kemp wrestles with Dostoevsky’s “divine hiddenness” (The Hedgehog Review). J.C. Scharl lauds Rabelais’s contribution to low culture (Joie de Vivre).
A new series of essays on American Catholic authors has entries so far on Walker Percy, Edwin O’Connor, and Donna Tartt (Dominicana Journal). Alex Taylor sees Tartt and Christopher Beha as literary “cousins” (Dappled Things).
At Law & Liberty, a 50th-anniversary forum on Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago includes contributions from Daniel J. Mahoney, Spencer A. Klavan, Jessica Hooten Wilson, David P. Deavel, and a reply from Mahoney.
Stephen H. Conlin reviews a new book on J.R.R. Tolkien and theology (VoegelinView), Graham McAleer reviews a new book on Tolkien and the Greeks (Law & Liberty), and Joseph Loconte reviews a new edition of Tolkien’s letters (The Wall Street Journal). Natasha Burge looks at C.S. Lewis in the age of the machine (Front Porch Republic), while J.C. Scharl considers Lewis and the “apocalypse of gender” (Religion & Liberty). Joel J. Miller introduces the “weird and wild mind of Charles Williams” (Miller’s Book Review).
Poetry
On February 22-24, Duke University will hold a symposium on “Poetry & Theology: 1800-Present.”
Rowan Williams praises the “metaphysics of particularity” in Czesław Miłosz (Literary Review). Tyler Malone surveys the work of Robert Frost, who rejected “banal drum-circle transcendentalism” despite his debt to Emerson (Poetry Foundation). Ekstasis Magazine has reflections on Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and on Brian Doyle’s Mink River.
Claire Wilkerson writes that “in light of the beatific vision, The Divine Comedy should be read as an avenue for personal formation because it is a deeply interactive work” (The Imaginative Conservative). Many of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnets concern the destiny of the soul (First Things).
An excerpt of Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair appears in Plough, and the book is reviewed by Nick Ripatrazone (The Bulwark) and by Whitney Rio-Ross (Fare Forward). Wiman is profiled by Casey Cep (The New Yorker) and interviewed by Josh Jeter (Ecstatic).
Wiman reviews the poetry of Lucille Clifton (Commonweal). Brian Volck reviews new collections by B.H. Fairchild, Scott Cairns, and Matthew E. Henry (Slant Books). David Middleton’s new collection, Outside the Gates of Eden, is rooted in the Book of Genesis (Measure Press).
Music
Stuart Halpern lauds the resonance of the biblical Moses and Joseph in the American blues tradition (Tablet), and Renee Waller reflects on sin, love, and mercy in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita (VoegelinView).
Australian rockers Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds give voice to “the universal human conditions of yearning, and of loss” (On Being). In Cave’s memoir, he writes of “the terrible beauty of grief” (Church Life Journal). The music of the late Irish singer-songwriter Shane MacGowan is “suffused with the Christian supernatural ethos” (The Lamp) and is “an important part of the meaning-making rituals of the Irish-in-exile” (Commonweal).
A concern for “the contemplative and the serene” in music will lead listeners away from the long-dominant Classical and Romantic periods, and toward Renaissance, Baroque, and contemporary “holy minimalism” (The Imaginative Conservative). Despite the interpretations forwarded by Bach’s influential Enlightenment liberal fan base, the composer was a devout Lutheran, not a closet rationalist (The Wall Street Journal). A performance by the Tallis Scholars shows the aesthetic fertility of Franco-Flemish art (The Boston Musical Intelligencer).
Cinema
Meaghan Ritchey offers a list of ten films “animated by unexpected and unearned mercies” (Mockingbird). Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List is newly published (Word on Fire); its chapter on Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion is online (Spe Salvi Institute).
Marco Respinti gives an Eliotic interpretation of Oppenheimer (The Imaginative Conservative), and Peter Leithart gives a Pauline interpretation of Nicolas Cage’s Pig (First Things). Arnold Schwarzenegger’s End of Days shows evil for what it really is (The Imaginative Conservative).
