Healing I The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common. In healing the scattered members come together. In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world. II The task of healing is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less. A creature is not…
Category
Art
When Poetry Is At Its Best | Art by John McCormick
Many people of faith feel a desire to speak about that which is most precious to them, about that which has transformed their lives, that which they feel has liberated them. Yet that needs to be contrasted with the concern that every time we speak of that source, that place of liberation, we somehow do…
Exceptional Art & Alluring Art or What Makes Some Art More Important Than Other Art
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it. The above quote comes from German educator Ernst Fischer. His view of art’s purpose and place in society closely…
There is no Room in the Bible for Piper’s “Masculine Christianity”
“God is spirit,” announces Jesus by the well (John 4:24). This is one of only two definitional propositions about God in scripture. The other is “God is love.” … This is a blog post in accordance and solidarity with Rachel Held Evens and her challenge for men to push back against John Pipers “masculine Christianity.”…
Are we stuck in an eternal state of adolescence?
In current Western and Westernized societies, in addition to the scarcity of true maturity, many people of adult age suffer from a variety of adolescent psychopathoogies–incapacitating social insecurity, identity confusion, extremely low self-esteem, few or no social skills, narcissism, relentless greed, arrested moral development, recurrent physical violence, materialistic obsessions, little or no capacity for intimacy…
Suppressing Feelings Doesn’t Make Them Go Away
Over the last 50 years, we have learned a lot about what helps children grow up to be psychologically healthy or unhealthy. Chief among those is the emotional climate in a family or simply put, the way parents treat their children and each other…A key element is listening with empathy. When parents learn to listen…
Diogenes the Dog; So you want to be a Cynic do you?
Diogenes was the first of a group of thinkers who became known as the Cynics, a term taken from the Greek kunikos, meaning “dog-like.” It reflects the determination of the Cynics to spurn all forms of social custom and etiquette, and instead live in as natural a state as possible. They asserted that the more…
Arresting of The Beautiful || Illustration by Sana Pearl Park
And, of course, the temple par excellence of culture is the modern museum in which the objects of art seamlessly mirror back to us the satisfaction (repressed, unconscious as it is) of our teleological drive to historical mastery bewitching ourselves into thinking we have achieved it. Art in this sense is double-edged: it is not…
The Will To Embrace: Sin and Family | Photography by Eric Cahan
“…the will to give ourselves to others and “welcome” them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. The will to embrace precedes any “truth” about others and any construction of their “justice.” This will is absolutely indiscriminate and…
Prolepsis: This Is What The Future Will Look Like | Art by Nuam Gabo
“Prolepsis is a Greek theater word. It is when the crowd–which is usually all the normal people in the play–come out and tell you at the beginning what’s about to happen at the end of the story and the meaning it has. So that you, the audience–when you’re watching the play–can come to see the…