When Sir James Gunn exhibited his famous painting, The Conversation Piece, depicting G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Maurice Baring assembled round a table, Chesterton, with characteristic humor, labeled the three figures, Baring, over-bearing, and past-bearing.
Even secular scholars agree that the birth of Jesus Christ is one of the defining moments of history. Yet cinematic recreations of the incident are strikingly few and far between.
Michael O'Brien shows how art and artists both reflect and inspire the religious sensibilities of their culture, and if the present nihilistic art is not to lead culture into the sewer, a revival in authentic religious art must arrive quickly.
For several decades now, writes Nobel prize for literature winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, world literature, music, painting and sculpture have exhibited a stubborn tendency to grow not higher but to the side, not toward the highest achievements of craftsmanship and of the human spirit but toward their disintegration into a frantic and insidious "novelty."
Recent surveys reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans feel Hollywood is out of touch with their personal values.
Thomas Doherty, a professor of Film Studies at Brandeis University, sees Hollywood's defense of the movie Dogma as another instance of the only acceptable bigotry in American-bigotry against Catholics.
Michael O'Brien reviews all the major Disney films in terms of the moral lessons they teach our children. While some of the early films are quite good, more recent Disney remakes of the timeless classics tend to trivialize the characters and strip the tales of their original moral content.
Why have there been so few really good holiday films? It seems there's this little catch: Christmas is about Christ, and Hollywood knows Him not.
To create a work of art is about discipline and struggle, tussling with limitations and inner visions that defy execution. As in the spiritual life, to embark on such a journey is to enter a battle.
We suffer today from a peculiar form of moral anaesthesia based on the delusion that by calling something "art" we thereby purchase for it a blanket exemption from moral criticism...