Bernini’s sculpture of Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius fleeing Troy, on their way to eventually found Rome. Anchises, the father of Aeneas, grabs the household gods while the city of Troy burns. Aeneas grabs his father, and has the boy Ascanius grab the fire. The boy carries the fire. The old man carries the gods. All […]

Ms. Odradek: The Chimera of Modern Culture

… our relationship with mass culture is in itself interminable. There can be no conclusion or certainty, where the very structure of communication has founded the reign of perplexity, of dissociation, of procrastination. ‘The consumer’s relation with the real world, with politics, history, and… I both like and hate this. It’s true, therefore I like […]

Winter Wheat (EP Review)

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 343 1960 Arbor Christian Academy 16 3 2407 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false Ryan Culwell’s last studio album, Heroes on the Radio, was released in 2006. Since then he led the rock band The Young Senators through a storm of shows in oil-field bars across West Texas before […]

Recovering from Moral Injury after War

@james_ka_smith tweeted this to me after my last post. If you decide not to read it, then I’ll probably be quoting paragraphs from it over the next few weeks. Introduction, Soul Repairhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/110229994/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll

The sacramental imagination, which affirms the goodness of creation, animates an iconic imagination that affirms the presence of the invisible in the visible—that ‘lifts up’ the messiness of bodies to be more than biological machines. James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? (via cwmyers) I think this way of seeing the world – creation as sacrament […]

It is too often forgotten that man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life, to ‘ideate’ the character he is going to be. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself…Among…possibilities I must choose. Hence, I am free. But, be it well […]

For expert writers like Bellow, Woolf, Carter and Nabokov, excess, somewhat paradoxically, is of the essence – so that excess might not even be the correct term after all. Life, they seem to say, is rarely transparent, and therefore neither are their sentences. More than this, their sentences do not merely reflect reality in any […]

msodradek: Still from chapter 8 of Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio (Francis, God’s Jester, 1950) Franciscan Grotesquerie … [Francis of Assisi]’s public appearances … are always impressive, graphic, and indeed scenic. The anecdotes which relate them are very numerous, and among them there are some which strike later taste as almost grotesque or even […]

http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/album=3452440983/size=venti/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=4285BB/ I have a friend, Ryan Culwell, who writes and performs songs out in Nashville. It’s been a few years and a move across the country since he released anything, but here is the latest thing: Golden On the Plains. I think it’s pretty great. Next month, he’ll release a four song EP called Winter […]

So decrepit and so abused is the language of the Judeo-Christian religions that it takes an effort to salvage them, the very words, from the husks and barnacles of meaning which have encrusted them over the centuries. Or else words can become slick as coins worn thin by usage and so devalued. One of the […]