Uncategorized

Lights On Empire State Building For The Whitney

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The Whitney Museum of American Art has a new building, and in connection with the 84th anniversary of the Empire State Building, interpretive lights displayed with the Empire State Building’s crowning LEDs gave New Yorkers something like a slow, quiet fireworks show. The lights intend to interpret twelve iconic works of art in The Whitney’s collection. Considering New Yorkers inability to sit through a single song, I wonder if many of them gave this show much notice.

And yet, I think the world belongs to things many New Yorkers don’t notice.

Religion

On the streets of Rome

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A conversation like this, or something like it, must have happened during the persecutions of the Christians in Rome.

Marcus, a Christian, meets his friend Gaius on the street.



Marcus: “How are you?”

Gaius: “Fine. Just got back from sacrificing to the emperor.”

Marcus: “Sacrificing to the emperor? When did you leave the Faith?”

Gaius: “Oh, I’m still a Christian. I just realized how ridiculous this whole business of refusing to sacrifice to the emperor is.”

Marcus: “How can you reconcile confessing Jesus as Lord with calling Caesar lord?”

Gaius: “See, this is where we’ve been getting it wrong. We’ve been making a big deal out of nothing. Look in the gospels. Do you see one passage where Jesus says we can’t sacrifice to Caesar? No. Not one. You’d think if this thing was so important, He’d have mentioned it, wouldn’t you?”

Marcus: “Jesus is the God of Israel, and He doesn’t allow worship of other gods!”

Gaius: “There you go. You’ve got to go all the way back to the Old Testament to find your rule. Aren’t we free from the Law now? Are we going to stone people for wearing mixed fabrics or eating shellfish?”

Marcus: “There’s a difference between the ceremonial law and the moral law.”

Gaius: “And there you go with the moral law. You realize that refusing to sacrifice makes our neighbors uncomfortable, don’t you? They feel judged. My God is not a God of judgment. He’s a God of love.”

Marcus: “You’re not a Christian anymore.”

Gaius: “You’re not a Christian either! You’re just a hater!”

Reading

Gaining the World Through Book Reading

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Hugh McGuire talks about and perhaps demonstrates the negative effects of giving ourselves to digital media on our minds. He says though he loves books, he wasn’t reading them. He had too many distractions. This year, he has set digital boundaries and seen positive results.

“When the people at The New Yorker can’t concentrate long enough to listen to a song all the way through, how are books to survive?”

If that’s the norm in New York, they need a revolution.

Goofing

#ClickbaitBooks on Twitter

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Trending on Twitter today are SEO headline takes on classic or popular books. #ClickbaitBooks gives us “9 Shocking Ways to Kill a Mockingbird”

Andrew Klavan has contributed several, including this:

Fiction

Life-Changing, But Quietly Dramatic

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“The best new films you’ve never heard of tell the stories of working-class women—a real estate agent and a factory worker—with scenes of ethical crises and life-changing decisions as compelling as higher profile films like American Sniper.”

Jeffrey Overstreet writes about the movies Something, Anything and Two Days, One Night. I haven’t seen the second one, but I’m sure it’s moving.

Authors, Non-fiction, Religion

Sin as a Damaged Form of Love

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Rod Dreher has written a personal reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy in a book called How Dante Can Save Your Life. Readers are posting mixed reviews, partly, it seems, because they don’t understand the depth of the subject matter. Dreher quotes a review and offers some reflection on the family matters he revealed in his book:

Given his life experiences, it would have been easy for Dreher to paint himself as a victim and blame everyone else for his woes. But neither God nor Dante allows him to do so. Rather, as he descends the levels of the inferno and then ascends the cornices of purgatory alongside the Florentine poet, he comes face to face with his own propensity to make golden calves out of his family and his tradition: in a word, southern ancestral worship. Yes, his father and sister must bear some guilt, but Dreher alone allows himself to become bound to these false idols.

He says, “For me, Dante’s understanding of sin not as lawbreaking but as a damaged form of love was important to understanding my crisis situation, and how to break out of it.”

Authors, Writing

A Gap Between Taste and Creative Work?

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Terry Teachout reflects on some writing advice from Ira Glass that has passed around the Internet for years. Here’s a part of it, if you’ve seen it before. “But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.”

The bottom line is to write through the discouraging junk until you gain the skill to write with the excellence your taste has always wanted.

Teachout says he didn’t have problem as such, because he didn’t start writing creatively until he had spent many years writing professionally.

All this leads me to believe that Ira Glass’ observations about the relationship between taste and creative inhibition are the answer to the question of why so few drama critics try to write plays. If you’re a competent critic, then you’re painfully conscious of the yawning gap between “good” and “pretty good.” That knowledge can’t help but be inhibiting—especially when you earn your living by sitting in public judgment on the creative work of other writers. . . .

For the moral of my story is that while it’s important to be realistic, both about your own abilities and, more generally, the larger prospects for success in the world of art, it can be just as important not to let yourself be overwhelmed by that realism.

Uncategorized

Spend 2:30 in the French Alps

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Filmmaker Franck gives us two and half minutes of beauty in this video of two boys in the French Alps. When you’re ready to take a break from your work, stand up, breath deeply a couple times, and watch this.

breathe from FKY on Vimeo.

More photos of the French Alps can be seen here.

Music

“Amazing Grace”

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For your delectation and inspiration, here’s Sissel Kyrkjebø, the pride of Bergen, doing a fine arrangement of “Amazing Grace” at the wedding of one of her band members. This is essentially the same arrangement, by Andrae Crouch, she did on her “Innerst i Sjelen” album. This recording lacks the quality of the studio version, but the live performance in a Norwegian church has charms of its own. Have a good weekend.

Religion

Lip Service Theology

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“If we say we believe God is sovereign, but spend our days wringing our hands and fretting, we’re just doing lip-service to theology.

If we say we believe God is love, but spend our days berating ourselves and others, we’re just doing lip-service to theology.”

Lore Ferguson has a brief devotional on this theme at a new website for gospel-oriented readers and leaders, ForTheChurch, at ftc.co.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture