Art, Faith

JPII to artists (1999)

LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS 
POPE JOHN PAUL II 
TO ARTISTS

1999

To all who are passionately dedicated 
to the search for new “epiphanies” of beauty 
so that through their creative work as artists 
they may offer these as gifts to the world.

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gn1:31)

The artist, image of God the Creator

1. None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands. A glimmer of that feeling has shone so often in your eyes when—like the artists of every age—captivated by the hidden power of sounds and words, colours and shapes, you have admired the work of your inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of all things, has wished in some way to associate you.

That is why it seems to me that there are no better words than the text of Genesis with which to begin my Letter to you, to whom I feel closely linked by experiences reaching far back in time and which have indelibly marked my life. In writing this Letter, I intend to follow the path of the fruitful dialogue between the Church and artists which has gone on unbroken through two thousand years of history, and which still, at the threshold of the Third Millennium, offers rich promise for the future.

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Art, Film

Netflix Will Keep ‘Friends’ Through Next Year in a $100 Million Agreement – The New York Times

Netflix cancels Daredevil, the most thoughtful and heroic show of the last decade, but spends $100 million to stream reruns of a brain dead, amoral, insipid sitcom. What a commentary on the state of modern culture.

The streaming service and AT&T struck an agreement that raises the yearly licensing fee for the show by more than three times.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/business/media/netflix-friends.html

History, Philosophy, Politics

The Bigotry Inherent in American Progressivism | The American Conservative

Tellingly, it is impossible to separate Progressivism from racial and religious bigotry, especially in the United States. Eugenics and social engineering come directly from America’s progressives, who firmly believed in a lily white, Protestant America. One of progressivism’s most famous scholars—a man who supported and received the support of Teddy Roosevelt as well as Woodrow Wilson—was Edward Alsworth Ross, author of the wretched The Old World in the New (1914). “In this sense it is fair to say that the blood now being injected into the veins of our people is ‘sub–common,’” Ross asserted. “To one accustomed to the aspect of the normal American population, the Caliban type shows up with a frequency that is startling.”
— Read on www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-bigotry-inherent-in-american-progressivism/

Philosophy, Politics, Republic of Letters

Supreme Court & Affirmative Action: Call It Racial Discrimination | National Review

Harvard’s racial and ethnic balancing is the poisonous fruit of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on race and affirmative action. And higher education isn’t the only place where racism rears its ugly head. Take the drawing of districts for congressional elections, especially the practice of gerrymandering, whereby legislatures create electoral maps to maximize their party’s advantages. The Supreme Court has injected itself into this most political of activities, one that the Constitution explicitly assigns to state legislatures and whose politically partisan use is as old as the Constitution itself (the word “gerrymander” itself comes from Elbridge Gerry’s drawing of a Massachusetts state-senate district that resembled a salamander; Gerry was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and a contributor to the first Judiciary Act and the Bill of Rights). Historically, Southern state legislatures used gerrymandering to reduce the voting strength of racial minorities, particularly African Americans. But now the Supreme Court has allowed the federal government and states to consider race in drawing voting districts designed to maximize the voting strengths of racial groups.
— Read on www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/supreme-court-racial-preferences-affirmative-action/

Politics

Map: Visualizing Every Ship at Sea in Real-Time

The ocean is a big place, which makes it a pretty difficult thing to wrap our brains around.

It covers over 70% of the Earth’s surface, is home to millions of species of life, and it makes up 97% of all water on the planet. But, with this massive size and ubiquity also comes a significant challenge for humans interested in trade: it must be constantly traversed in order for us to move goods around.

As a result, millions of people hit the high seas each day to get cargo from one place to another. The vessels used range from tiny sailboats to massive oil tankers, some of which can get up to four football fields in length.
— Read on www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-every-ship-real-time/

Philosophy, Politics

Focus on Reining in the American Bar Association | The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities

If I had one suggestion for the Department of Education going forward, it would be to strip the American Bar Association of its accreditation authority over law schools, leaving state supreme courts and state bar associations to determine whether graduates of any given law school may sit for the bar examination in their state. This move would require pressure from law schools, state legislators, and state supreme courts. It could unite conservatives and progressives in common cause.
— Read on allenmendenhallblog.com/2018/12/03/focus-on-reining-in-the-american-bar-association/

Philosophy

When Elites Were Elites | UB

That element is the “Republic of Letters,” which, Fumaroli explains, is today often a sort of jibe or ironic self-parody of the pompous and barely hidden commercial and professional competition of the literary world. The term, however, once meant something very different. It referred to a pan-European “society of literary and solitary savants,” with an overwhelming focus on the wisdom of antiquity. They studied the ancient world, engaged in a reading, rereading, and reinterpreting of its wisdom, and applied it to scholarly debates and European affairs. Their work did not render the original thinkers obsolete; this enterprise was viewed as a communion with the thinkers of old in a similar way that Christians honored and prayed to the saints. The Republic of Letters formed a “society within another society, a contemplative society within an active society, and a society united by letters, beyond death and distance in the same intellectual adventure.”
— Read on kirkcenter.org/reviews/when-elites-were-elites/

Philosophy

Inner and Outer Freedom ~ TIC

It is in this inner space that imagina­tion and thinking have their place. Or perhaps better, it is in this place that we think things out in the imaginative presence of everything we care about. One might say that the possession of such an inner place is identical with being free: here, inaccessible to the world’s manipulations but not isolated from its gifts, we fulfill our most intimately proper function, which is to think… (essay by Eva Brann)
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/12/inner-outer-freedom-eva-brann-90.html

Music, Books, Poetry, Film