Tomie and the Saints

By |2024-03-15T16:35:32-05:00March 15th, 2024|Categories: Art, Beauty, Books, Catholicism, Christianity, David Deavel, Sainthood, Senior Contributors|

Tomie DePaola may not have been a saint himself, but he recognized them, venerated the love of God in their lives, and drew them in such a way that we can see that love shining through his friendly folk art icons. Through the Year with Tomie DePaola, text by Catherine Harmon and John Herreid, illustrations [...]

Music As If Beauty Mattered: Composer Michael Kurek in Conversation

By |2024-03-13T19:23:52-05:00March 13th, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Joseph Pearce, Music, Senior Contributors|

Fifty years ago, when E. F. Schumacher published his international bestseller, Small is Beautiful, he gave it the subtitle “economics as if people mattered”. In 2006, when I published my own book, Small is Still Beautiful, I gave it the subtitle “economics as if families mattered”. In 1977, when Christopher Derrick published his book, Escape [...]

Depicting the Whole Christ: Von Balthasar & Sacred Architecture

By |2024-03-10T14:44:45-05:00March 10th, 2024|Categories: Architecture, Beauty, Catholicism, Christianity, Communio, Culture, Featured, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Timeless Essays|

Architecture, just like sacred music or art, must fulfill its highest calling, aiding the participant in seeing the glory of God. An architecture that is ordered to fulfill only its human, or even liturgical use, fails its higher purpose. The theological work of twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has only recently begun to take [...]

Beauty, Nature, & the Quest for Meaning in Sigrid Undset’s “The Wild Orchid”

By |2024-03-09T15:42:51-06:00March 8th, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Books, Christianity, Nature|

Sigrid Undset understood how experiences of joy alongside unfulfilled longings can break the spell of modernity and open a window into the spiritual life. "The Wild Orchid" explores the possibility of spiritual awakening in society that has grown bored with the Christian faith and is seeking new ways to re-enchant the natural world. In Sigrid [...]

The Magnificent, Overlooked Operas of Tchaikovsky

By |2024-02-04T07:30:37-06:00January 24th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Beauty, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky|

Tchaikovsky’s operas are remarkable for their passion, characters, and their pure, elevated humanity His music has the quality of touching something deep in one’s heart, revealing profound aspects of the human experience in a lofty and beautiful way that transcends time and barriers. Russian operas are not quite as well known as the operas of [...]

Can Something Be ‘Great’, Even If You Hate It?

By |2024-01-22T22:00:02-06:00January 22nd, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Literature|

I don’t really care for C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. I sympathize with the allegory Lewis was trying to present throughout the series, but I felt that it was too overt in places, and took away from the overall narrative. To me, it was distracting. But even though I didn’t personally enjoy the Chronicles of Narnia, I [...]

Chasing Lions: Don Quixote in Pursuit of the Beautiful

By |2024-01-15T18:05:45-06:00January 15th, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Featured, Great Books, History, Literature, Love, Timeless Essays, Truth|

When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. He conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of his honor and the common good, [...]

Realism in Modern Art

By |2024-01-07T19:26:28-06:00January 7th, 2024|Categories: Art, Beauty, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors|

One common criticism of realism is that it is merely mimicking what can now be done as well or better with a camera. This is simply not the case. With few exceptions, photographs only show the surface, not the personhood of the subject. "The Resurrection of Realism" by Igor Babailov During the time [...]

A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity

By |2023-12-20T07:39:28-06:00December 19th, 2023|Categories: Art, Beauty, Books, Christianity, Louis Markos|

If orthodox believers in churches and schools do not take upon themselves the responsibility of passing down the deposit of Christian art that has been entrusted to us, the next generation will grow up with little to no knowledge of, or gratitude for, the images by which the Christian worldview captivated the heart, soul, and [...]

Love to Learn, Learn to Love

By |2023-12-18T11:41:39-06:00December 17th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Catholicism, Classical Education, Classical Learning, Classics, Education, Great Books, Liberal Learning, Truth|

To get the most out of your time here, I have some advice: Love to learn, ignore your grades, and learn to love — and then I promise that Thomas Aquinas College will radically change your life. Before I arrived here on campus for the first time 23 years ago, my high school classmates had [...]

Warfare in Epic Poetry

By |2023-11-30T18:26:47-06:00November 30th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Civilization, Culture, Heroism, Homer, Iliad, Literature, Poetry, Timeless Essays, War|

A culture that fails to represent, or that misrepresents its wars in all their glory, gravity, and tragedy, is a weaker polity. Epic poetry, with its stark recording of the facts and feelings of war, can give cultures and communities access to the reality of warfare and inscribe its memory on the collective consciousness and [...]

Creating Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony

By |2023-11-26T13:41:55-06:00November 26th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Beauty, Culture, History, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Timeless Essays|

Tchaikovsky's First Symphony is a delight: fresh, assured and just plain fun to listen to. The violins introduce the first movement with a shimmering, sweet tremolo, giving it a dreamy, gossamer texture, that perfectly illustrates the movement’s subtitle, “Daydreams of a Winter Journey." While a longtime fan of Tchaikovsky, I must confess that, up to a [...]

The Arts as Sources of Epiphany

By |2023-10-17T17:28:33-05:00October 17th, 2023|Categories: Art, Beauty, Michael De Sapio, Senior Contributors|

Art achieves a kind of double reflection. It returns thanks to God, using his creation to fashion something new; at the same time, it reflects the glory and order of creation back to man, providing moments of epiphany. Art when properly made restores a proper awe before creation; although manmade, it directs our gaze back [...]

The High Dignity of Beauty

By |2023-10-12T17:55:36-05:00October 12th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Timeless Essays|

Beauty exists as an experience in its own right, to be enjoyed for its own sake, and in no way inferior to other values. Let’s therefore celebrate it, extol it, and accord it its due dignity. Those who hold classical philosophical views—such as we imaginative conservatives—consider it an indisputable proposition that beauty is the goal [...]

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