Poor Mendelssohn was rich. Had he only suffered more, he might have been a profound composer.

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...

Why the disappearance of the Christian artist in seemingly benevolent states? Surely this phenomenon points to the deadening of spritual faculties in any materialist society, including our own.

Michael O'Brien explores what is necessary for the Christian art of today to be true to its subject. In modern times, the lives of two religious artists, Georges Rouault (1871-1958) and William Kurelek (1927-1977), have left us markers.

Our society has become reflexively and stridently phobic whenever religion turns up anywhere outside the carefully controlled confines of church services.

Speaking of the hallowed right to free speech, neither the museum, nor the "arts community," nor the judge who first ruled against Mr. Giuliani has ever explained exactly what that shellacked lump of dung affixed to the breast of the Virgin Mary had to do with what the museum hailed as "the free exchange of ideas and information."