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David Jones by Mark Gerson (1965), in the National Portrait Gallery[/caption]
David Jones, Sanctus Christus
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David Jones, Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin (1925)[/caption]
Exiit edictum
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“Exiit Edictum” (1949), by the great poet-painter-calligrapher David Jones[/caption]
From a wonderful Bibliodyssey post about maps with sea-monsters on them
Obviously, the key question is whether John Coltrane is a saint or God incarnate
In the most perceptive part of his essay, Bottum argues that we lost the intellectual debate about same-sex marriage long ago, when we accepted routine contraception and divorce without a struggle. On that point he is absolutely right. We are losing the public debate on same-sex marriage today because we long ago lost—or rather forfeited—the debate on the very meaning of marriage. But to think that we can cede even more ground, and expect to gain firmer footing somewhere to the rear of our current position, is folly.Even if Catholics could find a stronger defensive position, what would we use it for? To launch our own offensive? On what issue? What other public battle should we be fighting? From the Catholic perspective, there is no public-policy issue—none—more important than the defense of marriage. Bottum toys with the notion that after conceding on same-sex marriage we might regroup to oppose abortion. Really? In theory homosexuals should have no stake in the abortion issue, but in practice they have made common cause with feminists. (“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”) We will not break up that alliance. More to the point, since the family is the fundamental cell of society, any attack on the family—whether it is abortion or homosexuality—is the equivalent of a cellular disease: potentially fatal. A society that his given its stamp of approval to homosexual alliances is not a society that will protect innocent children, born or unborn.
To defend marriage, the truth is enchanting enough - Catholic Culture.
I don’t agree with any of this, really, but I want to call particular attention to one problem here: the inability to think historically. Lawler thinks that being the “church militant” means always being the “church on the offensive.” If we’re not fighting — an important word to him — on one front we have to be fighting on others.
But I’d like to suggest the possibility that Christianity in America, at least in its public face, its witness in the public square, has fallen into sufficient theological and moral disarray that it may need to step back from its public role for a while to regroup — by which I mean to train up a few generations of faithful Christians who are less vulnerable that the current generations are to conflating Christianity with various versions of the American Dream.
When Douglas MacArthur was driven out of the Philippines he vowed to return, but not the next day. His forces had to recuperate and receive reinforcements, and he himself had to plan. Such things take time, and the church should be thinking on a far greater time-scale than a general does.
Maybe we Christians need to be worrying less about what “battles” we can win today and more about how we can build ecclesial communities that will be thriving and bearing strong witness a hundred years from now, in whatever political environment comes. Thinking in that longer term won’t make us passive, but rather make us active in a more patient, less frantic way; will help us suppress our inclination to believe that every cultural movement or legal decision that goes against us means that the sky is falling.
Apian, Peter, 1495-1552. Astronomicum Caesareum, 1540.Houghton Library, Harvard University
A change which has been coming over historical opinion within my own lifetime … is temperately summed up by Professor Seznec in the words: “As the Middle Ages and the Renaissance come to be better known, the traditional antithesis between them grows less marked.” Some scholars might go further than Professor Seznec, but very few, I believe, would now oppose him. If we are sometimes unconscious of the change, that is not because we have not shared it but because it has been gradual and imperceptible. We recognize it most clearly if we are suddenly brought face to face with the old view in its full vigour. A good experiment is to re-read the first chapter of J. M. Berdan’s Early Tudor Poetry. It is still in many ways a useful book; but it is now difficult to read that chapter without a smile. We begin with twenty-nine pages (and they contain several misstatements) of unrelieved gloom about grossness, superstition, and cruelty to children, and on the twenty-ninth comes the sentence, “The first rift in this darkness is the Copernican doctrine”; as if a new hypothesis in astronomy would naturally make a man stop hitting his daughter about the head.
The world in your handMeet the astrolabe: a two-dimensional model of a three-dimensional world - ours. The instrument was used to locate and predict the position of sun, moon and planets, but it was also great for determining the precise time at a given location. As a recent count of medieval specimens shows, c. 800 survive today, suggesting that the instrument was quite popular in medieval times.
What’s so great about these objects is that they are crossing the divide between books and other medieval artifacts. There are metal versions, plain like the second image above; and more complex ones with turnable disks (see an example here). But the object also appeared as drawings in books, as the top image shows. While the manuscript drawing above is unusually detailed and realistic, likely meant for real calculations, many book versions are far less complex - merely illustrating the text. A precision instrument contained on a flat page: it’s an unusual encounter for the historian of the medieval book.
Pics: the metal disk is a Hebrew astrolabe kept in the London Science Museum; the manuscript is Bruges, Stadsbibliotheek, MS 522, 14th century. Read some illuminating interviews with Astrolabe experts here. Feel like making one yourself? Check this out.
