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Serving Catholics for 25 Years
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| Note from the Managing Editor |
My husband, David, and I were recently watching a film set in late 1800s New York. The depiction of the lower classes was of a people so degraded that my mind railed against it. I did what I've often had to do when faced with popularized versions of history:
I reminded myself that, even then, there were good Catholics who were leading moral lives and treating themselves and others with dignity. Thus, the immorality and promiscuity depicted on the screen as widespread and normal is a lie.
In Francis X. Maier's article "2022: There's Good News and Bad News," he writes that many of us are "not well-formed in the sacramental imagination and intellectual substance of the Church."
It's this sacramental imagination that leads to the best art — for what is art but making the incarnate (what is in my mind's eye) carnate? Art, like a sacrament, is a visible sign of some invisible reality.
As Catholics, we have a duty to be well-formed. That's where the "know" part of "to know, love, and serve God" comes in. As Catholic artists, we have a call to tell stories well — as Maier says, to change "the way [people] see the world."
That is how most people convert: "most people have an encounter with God, through the witness of another person ... This is why stories are often more powerful than arguments. People love stories; we learn as we're informed or entertained. And this is the meat of good writing."
If you're an artist (and I'm saying this to myself too), make sacramental art, art that visibly depicts the invisible truths about ourselves, our world, and God — and ultimately draws us closer to Him. If you're not, seek out and support good Catholic artists.
As Dostoevsky wrote, "Beauty will save the world." - Meaghen Gonzalez
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"In our heart, in the heart of each of you, let there be always the joyous certainty that the Lord is near, the he does not abandon us, that he is near to us and that he surrounds us with his love." - Pope Benedict XVI
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| Joseph's Hidden Greatness |
| Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Meditations for Advent |
| Where shall I find a light bright enough to shine through the darkness that surrounds the life of Joseph? |
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| The Rock of Ages |
| Anthony Esolen, Magnificat |
| Nicolas Steno is justly considered the father of paleontology, and of the study of geological strata. His work was far ahead of its time. |
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| James Longstreet |
| John Janaro, Magnificat |
| For these efforts he was vilified, socially isolated, and labeled a "traitor" by many former friends and acquaintances. |
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| Men Are at War with God |
| First Things |
| Solzhenitsyn famously defined the principal trait of the twentieth century in four words: "Men have forgotten God." |
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| Our Lady the Doula |
| MFTB |
| As we near Christmas the reading from this past Sunday and today focus on Mary's conception of Jesus and then going to serve her cousin Elizabeth. |
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| Return to Planet Narnia |
| An Unexpected Journal |
| When talking about the discovery of an interpretative key for a novel, C.S. Lewis observes that the only way to test the supposed key would be to repeatedly re-read the novel in its light and see how well it illuminated the work. |
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