My friend J, a computer programmer, once convinced his former roommate—also a programmer—to watch the Japanese art film Asako I & II, about a woman who falls in love with two identical-looking but different men. J’s roommate sat patiently through this intricate, two-hour . . . . Continue Reading »
There was a time when the Church shaped Western high art, particularly art music, as distinct from folk or pop music. That era has been over for centuries, yet the impetus for composers to engage with spirituality has endured. There has been no shortage of scholars in recent decades endeavoring to . . . . Continue Reading »
Jimmy Mitchell joins the podcast to discuss his new book Let Beauty Speak: The Art of Being Human in a Culture of Noise. Continue Reading »
Living within a stone’s throw of the nation’s leading collection of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood art housed at the Delaware Art Museum, I was familiar with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art but not his poetry. I therefore appreciate having been enlightened by Brian Patrick Eha’s “Rossetti the . . . . Continue Reading »
“Are you still writing?” he asked. “I am,” I answered. “What are you working on at the moment?” “An autobiography,” I said. “Interesting,” he replied. “Whose?” The implication here, you will note, is that mine hasn’t been a life sufficiently interesting to merit an . . . . Continue Reading »
Something is wrong. Throughout the West, people are angry, anxious, and discontented. Paradoxically, the ill temper arises amid wealth unimaginable to our recent ancestors. (But perhaps this is not a paradox after all. Recall 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”) . . . . Continue Reading »
Tis the season of “The Artist”: On screen, in print, and on stage, the man of the hour is the creative genius, the absolutist, the martyr, the suffering sinner redeemed only when he gives himself away, lovingly and without reservations, to his art. Just ask Hollywood, which is all aflutter at . . . . Continue Reading »
Down a deeply rutted dirt road, far from Russia’s centers of power and wealth, sits a small compound behind twelve-foot-high brick walls. People in the nearest village, several miles away, have heard rumors that an odd man lives there, a monk perhaps. But no one has seen him or knows anything . . . . Continue Reading »
Life wreathes flowers for death to wear. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), who said as much, is dead and gone, his sonnets deader still, if we may judge by classroom syllabi and the infrequency with which his name appears in the leading periodicals. He still crops up half a dozen times a decade . . . . Continue Reading »
It was Lisa del Giocondo who first alerted me to the perils of photography. I’ve been visiting her for years at her spacious home in the Louvre, and I have always been bemused by the ritual of her admirers approaching her, camera in hand, clicking away furiously. But this summer’s visit, my . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
