Peter Edman
Daniel Henninger’s February 18, 2005 “Wonderland” column from OpinionJournal.com was recently brought to my attention. It definitely is worth a read.
“21st Century Art Makes Its Escape From the Toilet: We don’t need Modernism and Post-Modernism anymore.” Artists and art patrons of the world: please lend this man your ears for a few minutes.
What we need is an art, a culture, an aesthetic appropriate to the age in which we live--the 21st century, the Age of the Digital and the Age of September 11. Modern art isn’t it.
Modernism was a reaction to the industrial age or the machine age. It produced Cubism, Stravinsky’s music and James Joyce’s Ulysses (also voted the 20th century’s most important novel by a panel of the Modern Library). Its most important cultural values included discordance, challenge, collision, violation, confusion. This is wholly out of sync with what people want or need in the current age.
He has a suggestion for a positive way forward, and a recognition of and appreciation for the iPod.
To see what our age needs, go to Rome. Rome was the next leg on my European trip--six days of swimming across the church façades of Borromini and Bramante (whose architecture originated in what he discovered in the ancient Roman ruins), the garden frescoes from Augustan villas on the walls of the Palazzo Massimo, the mammoth marble raiment on Bernini’s tomb for Pope Alexander VII in St. Peter’s.
The 21st-century need that one finds here is not merely beauty. Beauty still sits in the eye of the beholder, and the 20th century produced much that is beautiful. What one finds in Rome are the aesthetic values of the High Renaissance--proportion, harmony and balance. What that produces--so different than Duchamp’s influence--is what we need: Respite.
Gleanings, Arts and Culture, Science and Technology, Mon 13 Jun 2005
The entire object of true education is to make people not merely to do the right things, but enjoy them; not merely industrious, but to love industry; not merely learned, but to love knowledge; not merely pure, but to love purity; not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.
John Ruskin
China’s Olympics: The Earthquake Dividend
The Renaissance and Religious Toleration
Zimbabwe, the Scandal of Africa
Russert and the Crystal Ball Media
Dear Kid: Die Now. Thanks, The Planet
The Oracle of the Dog by G. K. Chesterton, Foreword by P. Douglas Wilson.
A Father Brown mystery story that addresses themes of character, listening, and false assumptions.
The Long Road to Forgiveness: “On June 8, 1972, I ran out from Cao Dai temple in my village, Trang Bang, South Vietnam; I saw an airplane getting lower and then four bombs falling down. I saw fire everywhere around me. Then I saw the fire over my body, especially on my left arm. My clothes had been burned off by fire. I was 9 years old but I still remember my thoughts at that moment: I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way.” (Kim Phuc, NPR , 2008 07 01)
The Little Robot That Could: “Stanton: No, it always works backward. It’s more like, Wow, look what this sort of feels like. So you run with those things, because they’re very primal. In my mind they’re very much in the core of our storytelling. So much of the Old Testament is sort of built into our DNA. I’ve read other stories where you’ve talked about your Christian faith a bit. Can you tell me how your faith informs your creativity and your work? Stanton: They tell you that as a storyteller, it’s vital to just stick with and be honest with your values system. The last thing I want to do is go to a movie and feel like I’m being preached to or being told how to be, and I think it’s more honest—and you’re going to have more effect—to be truthful with the values of your characters, working off of your own values. That was the case with WALL•E. The greatest commandment is to love one another, and to me, that’s the ultimate purpose of living. So that was the perfect goal for the loneliest robot on earth, to learn the greatest commandment, to learn to love.” (Mark Moring interviewing Andrew Stanton, director of Pixar’s WALL-E, for Christianity Today , 2008 07 01)
Never Mind Machiavelli: ‘Of course, there was plenty of ambition. But with Washington, it was always tempered by a sense of honor. Where many of his more sophisticated contemporaries sought Machiavellian political guidance from “The Prince,” Washington looked to the Roman philosopher Seneca—not to find shortcuts to success but “to know how he should behave, and how other men had behaved in positions of power and times of stress.” (Aram Bakshian, Jr. on George Washington on Leadership by Richard Brookhiser in The Wall Street Journal , 2008 06 30)
A Stirring Defense of the Conversation: “The humanities are supposed to “give young people the opportunity and encouragement to put themselves—their values and commitments—into a critical perspective,” yet if the notion that class, race, and gender are absolutely determinative becomes an article of faith, then the very possibility of transcending one’s prejudices is ruled out.” (James Seaton, reviewing Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman, in The University Bookman , 2008 06 30)
• Let My People Go, AIDS Profiteers (2008 06 30)
• Between Obedience and Obedience (2008 06 26)
• Why Me? The case against the sovereign self (2008 06 25)
• Cities for Living (2008 06 25)
• Theophobia (2008 06 20)
Reasons of the Heart: Recovering Christian Persuasion by William Edgar.
While affirming the importance of reason in answering unbelief, Edgar invites us to make full use of the diverse forms of persuasion aimed at the unbelieving heart by exploring the “deeply human side” of Christian apologetics.
