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The Big Ship (Another Green World) / 1975 / Brian Eno
↓ 27 May 2012
St. Thomas called art “reason in making.” This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.
—Flannery O’Connor (via settledthingsstrange)
Is Kinkade’s work “dangerous”? It seems wrong, somehow, to grant junk like that much power. Then again, I think of the only time I actually saw a Kinkade on somebody’s wall. It was in the home of a very strict conservative Christian family that I once visited with a friend on an errand. I watched quietly while my friend took care of business. The only art on the walls was devotional; the only books on the shelves were religious. The only non-religious image anywhere in this extremely tidy house was a Kinkade cottage, full of light. It struck me as so strange, airless, and claustrophobic, that house. What must it be like to be a kid in that family, and to have questions, or doubts? I thought: more than one of these kids in this house is going to grow up to reject God, just to be able to breathe.
—Rod Dreher (via wesleyhill)
↓ 23 May 2012
There’s one more important point to make about this lust for mastery: we can’t not do this. That is to say, the aspiration to not be sinful is itself almost certainly to be understood as a sinful aspiration. Augustine would certainly say that the right response to perceiving one’s own sin is not to say, “All right. Now I’m going to stop that.” That’s the Pelagian response; that’s the response that says human beings are capable of following through with such a decision. The right response is to acknowledge our powerlessness before our own sin. That returns it to God. And only in that kind of acknowledgment is the capacity to move away from sin possible at all.
—Paul Griffiths, from this wise and perceptive interview (via wesleyhill)
↓ 22 May 2012
But if you pour out your love for others in friendship and service, if you offer your struggles and your need for surrender as a sacrifice to Christ, if you love God and those around you as deeply as you can in the best way you understand right now—I think even if you change your mind later, that won’t be something to regret. One of the biggest truths about love is that it’s never a waste of time.
—Yay Denver, home of happiness! / 2012 / Eve Tushnet
↓ 16 May 2012
Mirror / 1974 / Andrei Tarkovksy
↓ 14 May 2012
Once God was incomprehensible and inaccessible, invisible and entirely unthinkable. But now he wanted to be seen, he wanted to be understood, he wanted to be known. How was this done, you ask? God lay in a manger and lay on the Virgin’s breast. He preached on a mountain, prayed through the night, and hung on a cross. He lay pale in death, was free among the dead, and was master of hell. He rose on the third day, showed the apostles the signs of victory where nails once were, and ascended before their eyes to the inner recesses of heaven … When I think on any of these things, I am thinking of God, and in all these things he is now my God.
—Bernard of Clairvaux (via wesleyhill)
DON’T YOU LEAVE ME HERE by Jelly Roll Morton - NEW ORLEANS MEMORIES 1939 (by cdbpdx)
↓ 13 May 2012
Ex Machina: Berry: industrial completion
“Now the two great aims of industrialism—replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy—seem close to fulfillment. At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny. Corporate industrialism itself…
↓ 9 May 2012
Solaris / 1972 / Andrei Tarkovsky
↓ 7 May 2012
