The Church Building as a Sacred Place: Beauty, Transcendence, and the Eternal

by Duncan G. Stroik
The Monreale Cathedral

The fine arts are rightly classed among the noblest activities of man’s genius; this is especially true of religious art and of its highest manifestation, sacred art. Of their nature the arts are directed toward expressing in some way the infinite beauty of God in works made by human hands. Their dedication to the increase of God’s praise and of his glory is more complete, the more exclusively they are devoted to turning men’s minds devoutly toward God.-Sacrosanctum Concilium No. 122

How can we recover the sense of the sacred in our temples and shrines? We seem to have lost the ability to make new buildings which exude that ineffable sense of the “sacred” which can be rightly called the presence of the Almighty. Why is it that few of our churches built in recent decades intimate that the church building itself and the celebrations taking place within it are sacred? [Read more...]

A Proper Core Curriculum is Political & Ought Not Be “Politicized”

by John Alvis

Core Curriculum

John Alvis

The idea for this essay came from a question posed during a meeting of the National Association of Scholars, where several of the presentations had decried recent academic movements of the sort led by Marxists, feminists, homosexualists, or Black separatists, and complained of these groups having politicized higher education. Subsequently, a panel discussing the idea of a core curriculum featured a defense of Thomas Jefferson’s model for a system based in classical republicanism and another paper arguing for a reinstatement of the traditional center of education in the ideal of developing the good citizen. Sensing an anomaly, a Princeton graduate student asked what was the difference between conceiving of the purpose of liberal education as political and abusing advanced education by politicizing it? I suggest the question deserves careful consideration, and I offer here a distinction that may guide us in thinking through the current debate on the Western canon and its place at the center of a general curriculum. [Read more...]