A Spiritual View of Art
OUT OF THE WASTELAND
Several summers ago I was in the Arizona desert. It was not the time of year to be there, temperatures rising every day to over 105F, sometimes over 110.
The National Endowment for the Humanities, the chief funding agency of the U.S. government for advanced studies in the humanities, had decided to hold an institute there on the ancient Greek poet Homer. The bureaucrats decided that discussing the Iliad and the Odyssey in the desert in the summer would be what they called in their announcement an “epic experience.” It was, and in a way that was unexpected.
Surprisingly, the people who live in the desert seemed to have a heightened aesthetic sense — not just the intellectuals and artists, but ordinary people, working people. I wondered why this was.
The beauty of the desert itself was not sufficient to account for it. Where I live in California is at least as beautiful — San Francisco Bay, California coastline, redwood forests, lovely valleys. But this beauty does not seem to produce the same effect on the people who live there, at least to the same degree.
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We ought to pause before we abandon parish relationships, because our salvation might be enabled by the graces they contain rather than hindered by their stresses.
If doubt grip ye yet, as a last resort,/ Agnosticks consult this, our last exhort:/ Look well at your odds, muse Pascal's advice;/ His wager take; risk not the rolling dice.
Review of Making Saints by Kenneth Woodward, The Book of Christian Martyrs by Bruno Chenu et al., The Communion of Saints by Horton Davies, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints by Donald Attwater, and The Pocket Dictionary of Saints by John J. Delaney