In Bored Again Catholic: How the Mass Could Save Your Life, Professor Timothy O’Malley of the University of Notre Dame asserts that boredom is something we should embrace, that it is essential to spiritual growth and gaining spiritual insight. Distracting ourselves when boredom encroaches inhibits our ability to receive this insight, or even to pray at all.
Edmund Bishop made an interesting comment that during the Middle Ages, “the Blessed Sacrament reserved was commonly treated with a kind of indifference which at present would be considered to be of the nature of ‘irreverence,’ I will not say indignity.”
Following completion of construction in the 1620s, and reaching a peak in the first half of the 1630s, a dazzling array of artists worked side by side creating a series of some twenty-four works of art, primarily altarpieces, which, in their programmatic relationship to one another and to the hagiographic traditions of the Church, proclaimed the complex identity of the Papacy and the liturgical mission of “the cathedral of the world.”
John Saward's graceful and insightful book was developed from the Bernard Gilpin Lectures which he delivered at the University of Durham in 1996. The “theological meditations,” and this is the phrase Saward correctly uses to describe his prose, “lead us to understand what beauty is, and how it can be recognized in works of art and holy lives
This series of essays, edited by Louis Nelson, examines how people have interpreted the idea of the sacred in American history.
It is a watershed moment in a reviewer’s career to assess the scholarship of a former coworker, but the book’s primary subject matter will be esoteric to many
Seventeenth-century Bologna, despite having a smaller overall population, boasted more women artists than Venice, Florence, or Rome…
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852) was the subject of two past exhibitions: the first, in London, at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1994); the second, at New York City’s The Bard Graduate Center for the Studies in the Decorative Arts (1996).
The sort of books one might leave out on a coffee table when guests come over tend to be of a particular type.
Everyone ought to have at least conversational familiarity with the Mass they attend on Sunday, and Uwe Michael Lang’s Short History of the Roman Mass gives the reader everything necessary to hold a good discussion of it.
In this powerful book, Rev. Stefan Heid, rector of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archeology, boldly refutes modern assumptions about the liturgy and architecture of early Christianity, including commonly held errors about the “dining table” altar, domestic “house churches,” and the “versus populum” position of the priest during the Mass.
Of the many Benedictine reform movements that have occurred throughout history, one of the most interesting and least well known is that of the Cassinese Congregation.
When we step into Santa Maria Novella
Peter Anson’s wide-ranging discussion of church architecture and furnishings
A weird, monumental stone elephant has the power to lead a curious mind to make the statement, “No artist before or since Bernini has ever so clearly defined the image of a great city.”
To read Unearthly Beauty: The Aesthetic of Saint John Henry Newman by Father Guy Nicholls is to step through a doorway into Newman’s home.
In her most recent book, Elizabeth Lev takes up the project of tracing the history of Saint Joseph in art.
In his usual thorough and thought-provoking manner, Wall Street Journal architectural critic Michael Lewis’ book describes attempts at creating the perfect society in written and architectural forms.
It is not difficult to imagine an alternative history where, when Pope Paul III approached Michelangelo to take over as head architect on the construction of the new Saint Peter’s, the answer he received was a polite but resolute “no.”
In Building Faith: A Sociology of Religious Structures, sociologists Robert Brenneman and Brian Miller conclude what architects and architectural historians have long contended: buildings matter.
Few artists have allured collectors and captivated historians as intensely as seventeenth-century Dutch painter and printmaker Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669).
Studying the exchange of ideas and trends is a useful means of exploring how the periphery of empire affected its center,” writes Laura Fernández-González in Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire.
A work of rare conceptual rigor and enormous range and depth of research, Painting in Stone is a “biography” of a material common to many of the most celebrated buildings in the Western canon.
Maffeo Vegio (1407-58) was a man of many talents: a humanist, a master of Latin prose whose mentors and patrons were scattered across Florence and Rome, and a canon of Saint Peter’s in Rome.
Stephen Murray is one of the world’s foremost experts on French Gothic architecture.
Holly Flora has written an intelligent and insightful book about the thirteenth-century painter Cimabue.
How is it that the Dominicans amassed a priceless collection of artwork in their first two centuries of existence when they were men vowed to poverty?
A teacher recently told me about playing Simon & Garfunkel for her middle school students to introduce them to lyrics and imagery.
Donna Sadler’s study of late medieval Northern carved altarpieces focuses on their impact on the senses.
In 1842, Father Edward Sorin of the Congregation of Holy Cross began both a school and a parish in the mission that was known as Notre Dame du Lac.
The cross is the most widespread and universal emblem of Christian faith, an image of suffering transformed into a symbol of salvation and hope.
Rudolf Schwarz is principally known as a church architect and mystic-poet-philosopher of sacred architecture.
his beautiful book describes one exceptional commission of King John the Fifth of Portugal (1689-1750), placing the Chapel of Saint John the Baptist in the Church of São Roque (Saint Roch) as one of the highest achievements of world art.
Can a new sacred architecture be achieved in the twenty-first century, grounded in historical precedent but decidedly pioneering all at once?
Yes, there were times I questioned my sanity, but those doubts would evaporate when I would find an offbeat landmark or better, an eager person with local knowledge,” Bill Fitzpatrick writes.
Roger Scruton is without peer among contemporary philosophers.
Philosophical aesthetics tends to bend immediately to a discussion of beauty in the arts.
Thanks to Portuguese missionary activity in the sixteenth century, the Catholic faith took root among the people along the seacoast of Ceilão (as Sri Lanka was known).
An old Catholic prayer dating to the fourth century extols the incomparable beauty of the Blessed Virgin Mary with the words Tota Pulchra Es, meaning “You are completely beautiful.”
The Cistercian Arts provides a one-stop catalog that at once nourishes sufficiently and leaves one desiring more.
By any account, the Gothic period of sacred architecture is extraordinary in its scale and kinaesthetic impact on the viewer.
The use and role of art in the Catholic faith is boundless and intentionally so.
This engaging book offers a fresh perspective on how Christians understood and embodied their liturgical worship in the first three centuries.
Anne-Marie Sankovitch’s opus stands tall in its purpose to demolish tired narratives based on dichotomies between structure and ornament, and the Gothic vis-à-vis the Italian Renaissance, as she does in The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance, a careful study of the most important French Renaissance church and the only parish church in Paris to be raised in the sixteenth century.
The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, one of Christendom’s most eminent and ancient houses of worship, is unique among the loca sancta of the Holy Land.
The eleven essays collected in this volume study the partitions separating the nave from the chancel or choir.
In 1961 the Anglican Peter Hammond famously addressed in his book Liturgy and Architecture the relationship of church design to a reassessment of the church’s purpose.
In 2014, I had the opportunity to pass through Durham to finally see in person the cathedral I had particularly admired from afar.
While any attempt to return the oft-shunned Renaissance painter Fra Bartolommeo to the public eye should be lauded, Albert Elen, Chris Fischer, Bram de Klerck, and Michael Kwakkelstein deserve special mention for Fra Bartolommeo: The Divine Renaissance. Written as the catalogue to accompany the eponymous exhibition held in the Rotterdam Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen from October 2016 to January 2017, the book not only highlights the technical skill and careful craftsmanship of the artist, it explores the religious nature and significance of his art, something all too often sidelined in major exhibitions.