Friday Links, June 4, 2021
+ A too-late-for-Lent reflection about the salutary emotivism of the Liguori Stations + Innovative religious drama podcasts + James Matthew Wilson poem about a bartender featured at a dive bar/pizza place website + Joshua Hren on Henry James, Dietrich von Hildebrand, & the misuse of aesthetic appreciation +
MY ADORABLE JESUS
Late last Lent, Katy Carl, Dappled Things Editor in Chief, recommended this article by Terrence Sweeney at First Things as, “A good read for Holy Week from one of our new associate editors, who is also one of our partners at the Collegium Institute!”My apologies for the late inclusion of this post about the author’s reluctance for many years to pray the Liguori Stations of the Cross, with all of what he called their “emotivism.” Twenty years later, he learned to love the Liguori Stations again with “those essential words: ‘I love you Jesus.’”
“Jesus Falls the Second Time,” Artist unknown, from the collegiate church in Lidzbark Warmiński
As an aside, I lost interest in the Liguori Stations—because of what seemed to me for a while to be their excessive focus on Mary’s sufferings. I got over that too, but that’s a whole other story.
A dramatist with a flair for religious art takes to podcasting
Katy Carl also recommended the above-linked article. In the early days of radio, a lot of drama was broadcast on the airwaves. Fr. Matthew Powell, professor emeritus of drama at Providence College in Rhode Island, is a long time lover of radio drama who is bringing drama to podcasting. Fr. Powell recently produced and directed a 24-minute-long podcast of Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve for his WordPlay: Theater for the Ear and the Imagination podcast. Also currently on the podcast are Fr. Powell’s adaptation of a short story by Honoré de Balzac, “The Atheist’s Mass,” and a poem by Stephen Dunn, “At the Smithville Methodist Church,” in which an irreligious father sends his child to an arts and crafts program at a local church.
He is hoping to have a new production every few months.
Photo Courtesy of Father Matthew Powell
Happy P.O.E.T.S. Day! The James Matthew Wilson Edition
According to the web page of the DeVinci Pizza & Italian Restaurant, in Homewood, AL, James Matthew Wilson is the first living poet they have featured on their weekly P.O.E.T.S. day post. Besides pizza and some other related food, they serve wine and beer, and so maybe that is why they proudly advertise the place as a dive. They introduced Wilson as a poet whose adherence to form in his work makes him a breath of fresh air. Besides they like the profession of the poem’s main character—which is bartending.
“Friends, I'm not kidding you. One of my sonnets is the official poem of the week posted on a dive bar's website. Not only is this a happy honor, but the notice even states I am the first living poet to be so distinguished. As a former aficionado of Frank's Place, in South Bend, I speak truly when I say this makes my week, maybe my life.”—James Matthew Wilson
More than a Matter of Taste
The danger of relegating beauty to the trivial pursuit of pleasure.
Katy Carl also shared the above-linked article by Joshua Hren at Hedgehog Review.
“One of the great beauties of James’s art of fiction is his dramatic demonstration that aesthetic misjudgments can—not to say must—be connected to moral vice.”—Joshua Hren
Dome of Saint Peter's Basilica, by Maksim Sokolov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
