The following is a lecture on beauty and sacred art by Jed Gibbons, artist, designer, and vice president of the Catholic Art Guild, which is based out of the beautiful St. John Cantius Church in Chicago.
Tag: lecture
Drinking with the saints
One of the reasons I became Catholic was to put behind me the heresy of puritanism, wich was instilled in me via my baptist upbringing. Yes, drinking is a good thing — responsibly of course, and always in light of our calling to be saints.
The Altar as the Center of the Church
For some time now I’ve been fascinated by Church architecture and how it works. In my parish there is a small movement to re-establish the original high altar and tabernacle at the center of the sanctuary. It was moved to the right of the sanctuary sometime in the 1970’s I would guess. I wrote about it here.
My argument for moving the altar back to the center is based a lot on what a church is, and the overall design of churches, essentially starting with the structure and moving in towards the altar. What I like about the following lecture by architect Duncan Stroik is that he starts with the altar and “builds” out from there.
Of course, to understand the altar we should understand what takes place there. Do we truly have the body and blood of Christ? If yes, then that is huge. If no, then none of this really matters. Right? Sometimes I think that most Catholics today see the Eucharist as a symbol, not believing in the Real Presence, not believing in transubstantiation. I think churches in the round reflect that.
How we design and build our churches expresses what we believe to be true — and how we rank truths. A church in the round reflects some truth — that we are all fellowshiping around a shared table. But does it reflect the proper hierarchy of truths? Have more important truths been reduced in rank (as expressed by the design) and lesser, though important, truths been elevated? Has Jesus my friend been elevated over Christ our King?
The Worldview of the High Middle Ages
The three videos below are of an amazing lecture series by Dr. Andrew Jones on the worldview of the High Middle Ages. It is fairly technical, but this is important. We inhabit our modern worldview(s) like fish inhabit the sea. It takes a lot to grasp one’s own worldview, let alone understand another so foreign to our sensibilities as the Medieval one. The depth of Dr. Jones’ talks provide much of the necessary perspective to understand a traditional Christian perspective that is, I believe, essentially foreign to modern Christians.
I find the Middle Ages worldview particularly fascinating in light of Rod Dreher’s timely and provocative book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Dreher poses the idea that, since we live in a post-Christian world, Christians should recognize that fact and focus on what can be done to shore up the faith, including communities and practices that support the faith as a kind of bulwark against the prevailing winds of our time. This does not mean forsaking the culture and leaving it entirely to its own devices, rather he argues we should find other means of engagement than what we might be familiar with, while also focusing less on secular battles and more on building healthy Christian communities. Still, his vision is a kind of retreat into faith and Christian culture, and out of the culture wars and the insidious power of secular society. Drehere uses St. Benedict as an examples and talisman for his thought experiment — leaving us with more of a Medieval monastic approach than a modern sociopolitical stance. I find his argument mostly convincing — at least I want it to be, perhaps more than it is.
And yet, Dr. Jones’ approach is not about critiquing our modern world as Dreher does. He merely lays out the High Middles Ages worldview in such detail that one cannot help but compare it to our own. My reaction is basically this: Christians should jettison the modern worldview and embrace the medieval one. But this is no mere “Benedict option.” Rather, it is something even more profound. It would require a nearly total worldview, total cosmological reorientation of Christianity itself. In other words, what we call Christianity today is a far cry from what Christianity was in the Middle Ages, and we might want to grieve that loss.
Our modern worldview is the child of the Enlightenment. Modern Christianity, primarily Protestantism but also too much of modern Catholicism, is also a child of the Enlightenment, which was a child of Protestantism — a kind of serpent eating its own tail. In other words, once Western Civilization gave up on the Medieval worldview it’s been a slow slog downhill in many respects. Does this mean we ought to go back to the Middle Ages? No. But we ought to look deeply into their worldview and critique our own.
In short, we could only have ended up with the Novus Ordo Mass once we lost our understanding of the Medieval world view. It seems clear to me that the struggles many modern Catholics have with accepting the Traditional Latin Mass is that it truly seems fundamentally foreign to them, and in a sense it is. I would argue, and I think it is also clear from these lectures, that the Medieval worldview, at its core at least, is both more biblical and more human, than the worldview underlying much of what we might call “modern Catholicism.”
So, in another sense, we do need to go back. We need to recover the Truth about God, the Church, and ourselves. And we should look to the pinnacle of Christendom, its core beliefs, and its way of looking at the world and the life of man, to find that Truth.
For Protestants this will mean recognizing the more Biblical worldview is a traditional Catholic one. For Catholics this means the traditional Catholic worldview is one that far too many Catholics today (perhaps most) do not know or live. Perhaps what the Church needs is a new kind of renaissance — a rediscovery of what was lost, and then letting that discovery reanimate the Church and our lives. This could, then, become what brings Christians back to the same table, once again spiritually, liturgically, and visibly united in Christ.
O’Connor, Dostoevsky, and Christ Pantocrator: A Lecture by Dr. Ralph Wood
I’m reposting this, because it is so good. But also because we live in a society that has become a slave to sentimentality. This is also true of Christianity — sentimentality affects so much and we are so blind. O’Connor hated sentimentality. Ralph Wood speaks to this in the midst of so much else he says. A rich talk indeed.
A truly great lecture…
Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades Lecture: Serving the Church through Architecture
Many good points. The Q&A at the end is perhaps most interesting.
SatelliteSaint 