Arts and Culture
Items related to arts, literature, culture, and the media
Slow Down!
Tue 09 Feb 2010 • Responses: 4 • by T. M. Moore
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.
The Spaces We Inhabit
Sat 09 Jan 2010 by Keely Latcham
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.”
Embracing Our Creative Limitations
Fri 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.
Gollum as Everyman
Fri 15 May 2009 • Responses: 1 • by David Naugle
This 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.
Travels with Charley—and God
Wed 06 May 2009 • Responses: 7 • by Kelly Soifer
Reflections on an unresolved life
Kelly Soifer reflects on the paradoxes of John Steinbeck after reading his cheerful 1960 travel book.
Democracy and the Intelligentsia
Wed 26 Nov 2008 by Micah Mattix
Charles 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.
Tragic or Comic
Wed 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.
Strategic Cultural Thinking
Fri 10 Oct 2008 • Responses: 1 • by John Seel
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.
The Greatness of Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008)
Mon 11 Aug 2008 by David Aikman
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.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Supernatural
Thu 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.
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.
