Crown Arts and Culture

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The Barred Owl and the Bishop

FeatureThu 29 Jul 2010 by T. M. Moore

Barred Owl, photo by Michael Hodge (CC license)

Poetry and the Power of Association

T. M. Moore continues his series on poetry. Looking at poems by Richard Wilbur and C. S. Lewis, he helps us think about ways poetry creates lasting and life-transforming images for us.

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Line of Sight

FeatureTue 15 Jun 2010 by T. M. Moore

Anne Bradstreet and the book of creation

T. M. Moore continues his series on poetry. Looking at a poem by Anne Bradstreet, he shows how poetry can construct a line of sight from the world of material reality to the unseen realm of God.

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Spark a conversation with small group resources from the Trinity Forum Store

Too Busy Not to Versify

FeatureFri 16 Apr 2010 by T. M. Moore

CC license, photo by Simaron

Celtic Missionary Poetry

T. M. Moore continues his series on poetry by introducing poetry of the early Celtic missionaries Columbanus and Columba as an encouragement for even the busiest people to make time for the arts.

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Decoding the Language of Faith

FeatureThu 18 Mar 2010 by T. M. Moore

photo by Lamentables (CC license)

Poetry as a Living Witness to Doctrine

T. M. Moore continues his series on poetry by unpacking William Cowper’s “The Task” as an example of poetry that can help us understand and internalize the technical jargon of faith.

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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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The flip side of autonomy is loneliness.

Frederica Mathewes-Green

Featured Trinity Forum Resource

The Sunflower, coverThe Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal, foreword by Os Guinness.

A Jewish concentration camp inmate is pulled from work detail at a makeshift hospital to listen to a dying Nazi soldier’s confession. The SS soldier asks him for forgiveness that he might die in peace. In the Jew’s place, what would have you have done?

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Recent Articles

The Barred Owl and the Bishop

Line of Sight

Too Busy Not to Versify

Moore’s Law, Faith, and Truth

Decoding the Language of Faith

Slow Down!

The Spaces We Inhabit

Forgiving Enemies in Northern Ireland

A Comeback for Faith in the UK

The Gift and the Warning

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)

more . . .

Other Resources from the Fellows

Cover image via AmazonThe New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England by Harry S. Stout.

The New England Soul is the first comprehensive analysis of preaching in New England from the founding of the Puritan colonies to the outbreak of the Revolution.
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