My Neighbor Philip Seymour Hoffman
Shortly after hearing of the late Mr. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, my friends sent me texts: “I heard. I’m sorry.” Strange. I must have talked about this man, a movie actor who I did not know and who I never…
A journal of theology, imagination, and the arts.
Surviving the Sahara: On Being Bored
In his 1989 address to the graduating class of Dartmouth College the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky decided to forego the platitudes that comprise such ceremonies to instead admit that “a substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going…
Review: “Nothing Left to Say of Me” – Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal
Flannery O’Connor. A Prayer Journal. Ed. W.A. Sessions. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013, 112 pp., £10.87 cloth. I can’t imagine any scenario in which Mary Flannery O’Connor would be happy to know her youthful, private supplications and confessions…
The Art of Love
A work of art is a new creation, a thing with an existence of its own. As such it lives and speaks not only according to its creator’s original plan, but often far beyond the original concept in its creator’s…
Is The Maker Movement Making Souls?
Have you heard of the Maker Movement? I recently picked up a book titled The Maker Movement Manifesto (McGraw Hill, 2014). In this book, Mark Hatch, CEO of TechShop, argues that a Robin Hood-like revolution is underway in the…
Austin Farrer: A Very Different ‘Kettle of Fish’
Editor’s Note: In this second response to Michael Ward’s post, “The Next C.S. Lewis? A Note on Austin Farrer,” Professor Ann Loades gives a contrasting perspective. Whilst delighted that some attention is being given to one of the finest Anglophone philosopher-theologians of…
The Imaginative Legacy of Austin Farrer
Editor’s Note: In this post, Robert MacSwain responds to fellow St Andrews alum Michael Ward’s 14 February 2014 post: “The Next C.S. Lewis? A Note on Austin Farrer.” MacSwain and Ward co-edited The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,…
Review: What is Contemporary Art?
Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009, xiv + 329 pp., £17.50, paper. Terry Smith begins: “No idea about contemporary art is more pervasive than the idea that one can–even should–have no idea about it.”[p.…
The Next C.S. Lewis? A Note on Austin Farrer
It was sometimes said after C.S. Lewis’s death that his apologist’s mantle had fallen on the shoulders of Austin Farrer.[1] The two men knew each other well,[2] and Lewis’s respect for Farrer’s work[3] was warmly reciprocated.[4] This post aims to give…