The Judeo-Christian tradition is central to most great works of Western art—even modern ones—and this influence should be “seriously reassessed,” writes James MacMillan: “By this, I don’t mean in some reductive, anthropological detachment from the sources which amounts to a de facto denial of the theological and cultural claims of that tradition, or an implied, haughty downgrading of its authenticity. Rather, the reassessment is a recognition of the potency of a culture with Christ very much at its origin and center, and a joyous sense of wonder at everything that has flowed from it in centuries of music-making.”
Apparently after a Twitter spat, a British composer promises to stop writing operas. In response to criticism of his latest work—a chamber opera for children—Mark-Anthony Turnage said he would leave the genre to his “more talented contemporaries and younger colleagues.”
Another work from Tolkien’s archive to be published later this year. The decision to publish The Fall of Gondolin, which was written while Tolkien was in the hospital after the Battle of the Somme, “came as a surprise even to Tolkien scholars: Christopher Tolkien, who is now 93, had described Beren and Lúthien in a preface as ‘(presumptively) my last book in the long series of editions of my father’s writings’.”
Are Christianity and liberalism compatible? Matthew Robare reports from a conference that doesn’t quite answer the question. Perhaps the problem is not liberalism but materialism?
The early days of William F. Buckley’s National Review: Neal B. Freeman remembers a Buckley who was “both a serial-fight picker and a tireless combatant...He had the heart of a lion-in-the-wild. He had the patch-up skills of a combat medic...[and a] real American strain of joie de vivre. He never had to conscript us. We raced to volunteer.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, William Logan revisits Philip Larkin’s poem of homecoming, “I Remember, I Remember”:
“‘Home is where the heart is.’ ‘There’s no place like home.’ ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in.’ ‘You can’t go home again.’ No doubt even before the Odyssey the strain of homecoming was troubled by unwelcoming. For every Penelope weaving by day and unweaving by night, there are a hundred suitors waiting to kill you. Ovid was sent into exile for a ‘mistake’ more tantalizing for remaining a mystery; had he returned to Rome without leave, Augustus would have put him to death. The longing for home is so universal, rare are the fictions where the prodigal son refuses to return.
“No matter how long a maze, twenty yards or twenty years, the Minotaur lurks at the center—eventually you’ll end up there, like it or not. Philip Larkin’s ‘I Remember, I Remember’ opens with a musty scenario: a man on a train. The train stops. The traveler who spent years fleeing his hometown returns by accident. The poem opens before the speaker realizes where he is...”
Photo: Mount of Olives
Poem: Anna M. Evans, “A Tune to Remember”
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