Coleridge is a monthly digest of noteworthy items in theology and the arts.
Art and Architecture
Is art a secular invention? Matthew Milliner tests the theory with a trip to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (Comment). Two other Wheaton professors have received a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust for research at the Art Institute of Chicago (Wheaton).
Without God, how can one account for the beauty of Gothic architecture? (The Tar Water). James Stevens Curl endorses Elena Curti’s book Another Fifty Catholic Churches to See Before You Die (The Critic) and Elizabeth Lev places the rebuilding of Notre-Dame in Paris in historical perspective (Plough).
In California, Heading Home: Glimpses of New Jerusalem is on view at the Ahmanson Gallery (Ecstatic). In New York, Africa and Byzantium and a reinstalled European wing are at the Metropolitan Museum, and Cindy Hernandez Mathis profiles Arthouse2B, a multidisciplinary group of artists cultivating Catholic arts renewal (First Things).
Kinga Lipinska lauds the Berlin restoration of the 15th-century Monforte altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes of Ghent (Liturgical Arts Journal), and Arabella Illingworth offers qualified praise for the austere Protestant Haarlem milieu of Frans Hals, who was a “nominal Calvinist” but also possibly Catholic (Catholic Herald).
Irena Tippett explores Wassily Kandinsky’s 1911 painting All Saints Day II (ArtWay), and Isaac Sligh profiles the self-taught Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani (The New Criterion). Between 1921 and 1933, the English artist Gabriel Pippet decorated a Worcestershire church with mosaics deeply inspired by those in Ravenna (Liturgical Arts Journal).
“What are you looking for?” (John 1:38) presents work by artists Michael Cook and Michelle Holmes (Coventry Cathedral). “Everyone operates in the field of faith, just as everybody has a body and everybody has a mind,” says Jonathan Ruffer, a driving force behind the new Faith Museum in Bishop Auckland, County Durham (The Guardian). Pierre d’Alancaisez thinks that England’s cathedrals and museums are in the same boat (The Critic).
Now available: Jem Sullivan’s book Sacred Art Every Catholic Should Know (TAN Books), and Christmas cards with John Hayward’s 1962 Nativity mural (Art+Christianity).
Contemporary Fiction
Jaspreet Singh Boparai favorably contrasts Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, “a novel about the soul,” with the genre of autofiction, which he deems “a self-defeating exercise—a futile act of defiance in the face of death, as practiced by writers who equate death with annihilation” (First Things). The title character in Daniel McInerny’s The Good Death of Kate Montclair receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and writes a memoir of her experience (Dappled Things).
Quinn, by Em Strang, who teaches in prison, is about the “hard cases” of forgiveness, in which the harm done is so serious that genuine forgiveness seems impossible (Plough); Ayana Mathis considers the treatment of suffering and evil in novels by S.M. Hulse, Julie Otsuka, and James Baldwin (The New York Times).
Michael O’Connell compares Alice McDermott’s treatment of suffering, tragedy, and conflict in her new novel, Absolution, with that by Martin Scorsese in Killers of the Flower Moon (Church Life Journal); Sam Sacks also reviews Absolution (The Wall Street Journal).
Katy Carl appreciates the Irish Catholic family in McDermott’s Charming Billy (Depth Perception), and interprets Jon Fosse’s Septology as a kind of “courtroom” for deliberating on challenging questions of faith (Public Discourse). Glenn Arbery praises the tragic bent of Carl’s short stories (First Things).
Ali Holcomb embraces the unknown in Bill Watterson’s The Mysteries (Fare Forward), and Alan Jacobs enjoys the sense of enchantment in Adam Roberts’s The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate (The Homebound Symphony).
An interview with Spanish Catholic novelist Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera, author of The Awakening of Miss Prim and A Christmas Carol for Le Barroux, is online (New Liturgical Movement), and Patricia Lockwood reports on her meeting with Pope Francis (London Review of Books).
Classic Fiction
Jean-Paul Sartre’s nativity play, Bariona, or the Son of Thunder, premiered in a Nazi POW camp in 1940 (Commonweal).
Alan Jacobs reflects on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (The Homebound Symphony). In The Brothers Karamazov, Peter Wehner takes guidance from the character Father Zosima on theodicy and the problem of pain (Plough), while Simon Earle dives deeply into that novel’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, agreeing with Camus that Dostoevsky was the prophet of the 20th century and asking: “Do people truly desire freedom?” (The New Statesman). Isaac Wood admires Wendell Berry’s characters Hannah and Burley Coulter for their wisdom in grasping freedom’s nature and its limits (Front Porch Republic).
In The Great Gatsby, Frank DeVito finds Tom and Daisy Buchanan desperately seeking transcendence in a materialist world (Front Porch Republic). Stephen Schmalhofer writes that the romantic Roman aristocrats in F. Marion Crawford’s Saracinesca were loved by Russell Kirk for their demonstration of “the rightly ordered relations of men and women enlivened by magnanimous love” (The Imaginative Conservative). Matthew Schmitz shows how Kirk’s ghost stories “reveal the gothic cast of the conservative mind” (First Things).
Fr. Damien Ference’s Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist, on Flannery O’Connor’s philosophy, is reviewed by Simon Caldwell (Catholic Herald) and Alex Taylor (Law & Liberty). Brian A. Smith revisits Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos 40 years later (Religion & Liberty Online).
Holly Ordway reviews a newly revised and expanded edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters (Word on Fire), Adam Schwartz reviews Ordway’s spiritual biography of Tolkien (The University Bookman), and Br. Noah Sell outlines Tolkien’s Catholic political philosophy (The American Postliberal). Gavin Ashenden writes that “for Tolkien, the pattern of the interweaving of love through all the categories of existence, of immortal and mortal, man and woman, lover and beloved, always co-dependent, is drawn from the deeper wisdom of the Gospels” (Catholic Herald). Rhys Laverty praises the prophetic C.S. Lewis (The Critic).
Contemporary Poetry
Victoria Emily Jones has anthologized a second annual set of 25 poems for Christmas (Art & Theology).
New books have recently appeared from Malcolm Guite (Sounding Heaven and Earth), Scott Cairns (Lacunae), Christian Wiman (Zero at the Bone), and an anthology edited by Dana Gioia and Mary Grace Mangano (Homage to Søren Kierkegaard).
Clara’s Bees, by Catherine Savage Brosman, is “precise, intelligent, and compassionate, and contains quiet wonders worthy of contemplation” (Dappled Things). Butterfly Nebula, by lay Carmelite Laura Reece Hogan, is a “God-teemed book” (Catholic Herald).
A Crown for Abba Moses, by Timothy Bartel, shows “the spiritual landscape of conversion: tension, change, and upheaval” (Dappled Things). Leaping from the Burning Train, a memoir by poet Jeanne Murray Walker, rejects both fundamentalism and uncertainty in favor of faith (Fare Forward). David Mason “employs religious language frequently enough to make one hope he will someday trade his ambivalence for a living faith” (First Things).
Classic Poetry
Anthony Hecht, although detached from Jewish practice and unsettled by Christian antisemitism, “spent much of his life reading and contemplating the Bible and thought of himself as a religious poet” (National Review).
For J.C. Scharl, every reader of Paradise Lost, “by being moved by the Devil’s pride, rebuilds Hell in his own heart” (Religion & Liberty Online), while for Ed Simon, Milton’s poem makes sense “as the fable of a glorious creation made still more glorious by the diehard rebellion of one of the creatures” (The Hedgehog Review). Joseph Pearce sees Macbeth as an alter ego of Nietzsche (The Imaginative Conservative). Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is about the definitive overcoming of the biblical God (Church Life Journal).
Langston Hughes was preoccupied by ghosts (Literary Hub). William Gilbert, son of a Methodist slave-owning planter on Antigua, “believed that the subjugated spirits of Africa and America were reappearing in the world in the form of the American and then the French Revolutions” (Slant Books).
Thomas Traherne’s “News” engages “the tension produced by our longing for that which we most desire, yet from which we are absent” (Ad Fontes). Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti uses an exalted, Christian-Platonic view of the number as “not a man-made thing, but an incorporeal reality, springing from the mind of God” (Anthony Esolen). St. Francis enjoined his brothers to sing his “Canticle of the Sun” without ceasing (Commonweal).
Music
Joy Clarkson writes that “Arvo Pärt’s music evokes the poignancy of our fragile lives intermingled with eternity” (Plough). Anthony Esolen appreciates “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say,” by Horatius Bonar, with music by Ralph Vaughan Williams (Word & Song). Two new Advent carols will premiere at the Benedict XVI Institute’s “Very Marian Advent Prayer Service” (National Catholic Register).
Zachary Hardman follows Paul Simon’s long journey toward “a gentle spirituality” (The Critic). Jeff Tweedy converted to Judaism after his son’s rabbi told him that “what matters is that you search for the sacred” (All Things Considered). U2’s 1993 album Zooropa demonstrates a certain measure of hope amid a post-Christian society (Spe Salvi Institute). Shane MacGowan’s identity was shaped by Irish Catholicism (Catholic Herald).
Sarah Gates makes a baptismal interpretation of Taylor Swift’s song “Clean” (Mockingbird), while Catholic Bishop Robert Brennan of Brooklyn has taken disciplinary action after Sabrina Carpenter, who is opening for Swift in Latin America, filmed a racy music video at a local church (Daily Mail).
Brett McCracken offers a playlist of 100 songs for new Christians, comprising opening prayers; creeds and catechisms; the five solas; Scripture songs; hymns; and closing prayers (The Gospel Coalition).
Film
Robert B. Pippin rejects the common interpretation of Robert Bresson’s films in terms of “a religious sensibility that is honest about profound human sinfulness (even depravity) as well as its possible redemption in moments of grace” (Liberties). Paul Schrader, raised in Calvinist Grand Rapids, Michigan, believes that Bresson’s films achieve “a transcendent state which allows the everyday and the passionate, the physical and the spiritual, to coexist in the same frame” (The Baffler).
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a story of guilt (Plough), complicity (Vox), and passivity (Angelus), while Wildcat, Ethan Hawke’s Flannery O’Connor biopic, is “a revelation, a gift and a labor of love” (America), a “frankly weird mish-mash” (Catholic Herald) and/or reductive, obvious, and mediocre (The Guardian).
Andrew Petiprin introduces 8Beats, a set of short films about the Beatitudes (Word on Fire), and writes that Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla “presents a woman’s rightful needs in marriage in ways that contrast with certain tradbro expectations” (Catholic World Report).
Mark Movsesian argues that Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose is the best Thanksgiving film (First Things), while Brett McCracken finds Journey to Bethlehem disappointing and demoralizing (The Gospel Coalition).
