Collect

Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal; grant this, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Reblog: Eve Tushnet and Dana Gioia

Eve Tushnet has just put up a post in reply to this magnificent article from First Things by Dana Gioia, which expresses a lot of things I've been thinking for a long time but hadn't articulated, or not much. (If you find Gioia's article a bit TLDR, I recommend just reading sections II, V, and VIII for a suggestion of the substance -- but I recommend even more setting aside time to read the whole thing, if you are the sort who cares about religion and/or art.) I'm not certain that I follow all of her criticisms -- I follow First Things rather irregularly, and I don't really know much of anything about the publishing world -- but I agree wholeheartedly with her point that most culture today is subculture. I've noticed it most of all in music, and to a lesser extent in literature; but the rise of web delivery of virtually every form of art has clearly allowed such individualized subtypes to develop in most kinds of art.


"The new crowd is heavily shaped by this guy named Eric, who's basically the 
Paris Hilton of the amateur plastic crazy straw design world." -- Randall Munroe

I haven't taken much time to think about it, but it'd be very interesting to work out exactly what the implications of this multiplication of subcultures are for the New Evangelization. It fills me with a profound sense of something or other.

2 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not entirely clear what the argument or purpose of this comment is; however, it seems to me to be in poor taste to (apparently) speak derisively of Polish Catholic literature and mention Auschwitz in the same breath. If this is aimed at a specific work or works, then I'd ask that specific works be criticized as such, and that such criticism be germane to the topic of the post.

      Delete