Crown Arts and Culture

Items related to arts, literature, culture, and the media

Slow Down!

FeatureTue 09 Feb 2010 • Responses: 4 • by T. M. Moore

photo by Marilylle Soveran

Maximizing the Moments of Life

In the first of a series, T. M. Moore looks at the ways poetry can help us pay attention to the individual moments of our too-hurried lives and see the beauty and truth we would otherwise miss.

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The Spaces We Inhabit

Sat 09 Jan 2010 by Keely Latcham

photo by Zach Stern, CC license

In thinking about the importance of the spaces we inhabit, I recently read The Architecture of Happiness by Swiss philosopher and author Alain de Botton. An interesting read accompanied by many beautiful photographs, the book encouraged me to think further about the connection between space and identity—and virtue. We are not just spirits; we are more than our online presences. We have bodies and we live in spaces that help shape our experience of life.

One of de Botton’s central ideas is that of an alignment between the visual and ethical realms. That is to say, we find architecture beautiful because it corresponds to our ideas about “the good life.” Beautiful buildings, de Botton suggests, correspond to virtuous and happy people. Of course this is not always the case, nor is it a causal relationship; while architecture may suggest such ideals, it doesn’t necessarily bring them about. De Botton notes, “Not only do beautiful houses falter as guarantors of happiness, they can also [fail] to improve the characters of those who live in them.” While architecture undeniably possesses moral messages, he says, it “simply has no power to enforce them.”

However, de Botton insists that beautiful buildings convey a moral attitude, which recalls the claim of the great nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin that buildings speak to us “both of what we find important and what we need to be reminded of.” De Botton writes that architecture invites us to emulate its spirit, offering values it encourages us to adopt as our own. “It is architecture’s task,” de Botton says, “to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.”

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Embracing Our Creative Limitations

FeatureFri 19 Jun 2009 by Patrick Kavanaugh

The real obstacle may be too many possibilities

Composer and conductor Patrick Kavanaugh helps us see the way our limitations can drive creativity.

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Gollum as Everyman

Fri 15 May 2009 • Responses: 1 • by David Naugle

book cover imageThis article is adapted from material in Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness (Eerdmans 2008).

“There is not any thing in this world, perhaps, that is more talked of, and less understood, than the business of a happy life.” Seneca said this centuries ago, and it is still true today.

Down the ages, the best human thinking has connected our happiness with what we love. What do you love? How do you love the things that you love? What do you expect from the things you love? There aren’t too many questions more important than these. The reason is that what we love makes us who we are. If we love something that cannot sustain the weight of our expectations, or if we love something in the wrong way, such disordered loves will destroy the very happiness we seek and will eventually disfigure us.

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Travels with Charley—and God

FeatureWed 06 May 2009 • Responses: 7 • by Kelly Soifer

the camper, Rocinante

Reflections on an unresolved life

Kelly Soifer reflects on the paradoxes of John Steinbeck after reading his cheerful 1960 travel book.

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Democracy and the Intelligentsia

A ReviewWed 26 Nov 2008 by Micah Mattix

book cover imageCharles Kurzman, Democracy Denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy, Harvard University Press, November 2008. 405 pages, $49.95

When I was a teaching assistant at one of Switzerland’s cantonal universities, one of my colleagues once told his students that they, as the intellectual elite of the country, were responsible for protecting Switzerland’s liberal democracy against dangerous attacks on individual freedom from the extreme right. The face of that extreme right was Christoph Blocher, who became a member of the Swiss Federal Council in 2004, and who took a number of public positions that encouraged xenophobia and racism. As my colleague spoke, however, he seemed to lump religious conservatives with Blocher as potential enemies of liberal democracies worldwide. The reasoning, it seems, was that religious conservatives too worked to limit individual freedom, in particular with respect to moral issues such as gay rights and abortion.

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Tragic or Comic

FeatureWed 12 Nov 2008 by Dan Russ

Two Visions of Life and Leadership

Senior Fellow Dan Russ turns to the two epics of Homer to recover a humane vision and strategy for leadership.

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Strategic Cultural Thinking

A ReviewFri 10 Oct 2008 • Responses: 1 • by John Seel

photo by Peter Edman

On Culture Making, Artifacts, Discernment—and Elites

John Seel takes a critical look at Andy Crouch’s important new book, Culture Making, affirming his call for getting busy making more culture, but suggesting that his view of culture is too narrow—and oddly materialist.

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The Greatness of Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008)

FeatureMon 11 Aug 2008 by David Aikman

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A Second Look

David Aikman looks back at his three interviews with the great Russian writer and offers a different assessment of his life, message, and influence.

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Supernatural

a columnThu 19 Jun 2008 by David Aikman

Despite Lucas’s New Age leanings, he firmly sides with traditionalists in the view that ancient religious artifacts of traditional religions contain real powers that should not be tampered with by human beings.

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Warning: This commentary contains spoilers for the latest film.

After nineteen years of absence from movie screens around the world, the re-appearance of Indiana Jones in a new movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was accompanied by security precautions worthy of a new Pentagon weapons project. Movie extras were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement about the content of the movie, and one actor was allowed just a few hours to read the script in London prior to contract-signing before a courier flew it back to Los Angeles to re-deposit it in a safe. In Los Angeles, in a police sting operation, a man was arrested for trying to sell production photographs that he had allegedly stolen from the offices of producer George Lucas.

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Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.

G.K. Chesterton, GK’s Weekly, April 7, 1923

Featured Resource

Cover image via AmazonA Faith and Culture Devotional: Daily Readings on Art, Science, and Life by Kelly Monroe Kullberg and Lael Arrington, eds.

A daily guided tour through many of the paintings, laboratories, rock arenas, great books, mass movements, and private lives that have shaped the ways in which we think and live.

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Slow Down!

The Spaces We Inhabit

Forgiving Enemies in Northern Ireland

A Comeback for Faith in the UK

The Gift and the Warning

Before Clapham

Secularism’s Special Pleading

The Importance of Gratitude

The courage of faith

On Forswearing Greed

Gleanings Quick Links

President Obama’s Proposals for a Second Fiscal Stimulus: Senior Fellow Prabhu Guptara: “Is there anything short of divine miracles which will be good for job creation, good for the small business sector, good for the economy as a whole, and good for President Obama?” (Renaissance: Insights for Action in Today’s World • 2010 02 09)

How the Victoria and Albert Museum dealt with the dying of Christianity: “This situation is unprecedented in western civilisation: even 50 years ago, when these galleries of one of the richest collections in the world were last displayed in the V&A, they could assume that everyone was familiar with the rudiments of Christianity. Now, in a twinkling of an eye, 2,000 years of culture in the profoundest meaning of the word have been largely forgotten.” (Anna Somers Cocks, The Art Newspaper, December 2009 • 2010 01 05)

The God that Fails: David Brooks: “Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.” (New York Times, December 31, 2009 • 2010 01 05)

From Winchester to Westminster: Jonathan Aitken discusses Sir John Templeton recently in the American Spectator; here’s a quote from the late philanthropist on gratitude: “Thanksgiving opens the door to spiritual growth. If there is any day in our life which is not thanksgiving day, then we are not fully alive. Counting our blessing attracts blessings. Counting our blessings each morning starts a day full of blessings. Thanksgiving brings God’s bounty. From gratitude comes riches—from complaints, poverty. Thankfulness opens the door to happiness. Thanksgiving causes giving. Thanksgiving puts our mind in tune with the Infinite. Continual gratitude dissolves our worries.” (The American Spectator • 2009 09 11)

Welcome, National Affairs (2009 09 08)
Looking for an Honest Man (2009 09 08)
Why AI is a dangerous dream (2009 09 08)
Restoring the Fresco of Progress (2009 08 28)
The Case for Working With Your Hands (2009 06 04)

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Other Trinity Forum Resources

A Practical View of Real Christianity by William Wilberforce, Foreword by Chuck Stetson.

This Reading is an Executive Summary of A Practical View of Real Christianity by William Wilberforce with a Foreword by Chuck Stetson.

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