I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
I enjoy sharing some of G.K. Chesterton’s thoughts on art (did you know he was trained as an artist?) – the whiteness of chalk, the value of doing things badly, the importance of framing, whether poetry should rhyme, learning to bear the tension of paradox, etc…. So many people know other facets of his thought, or enjoy his fiction without delving into what he thought about art-making, being a creator, or the role of the artist in the Church and society.
Chesterton is a great example of a truly playful soul – one who romps around in a universe made of building blocks and filled with toys enjoying it almost as much as its Maker does. His character Innocent Smith, in Manalive, is an artistic embodiment of this fresh, childlike, world-overturning spirit.
For all his fictionality, he’s a real and true example of what it means to be a Christian adult, fearfully and wonderfully made and gloriously free. Chesterton’s Gabriel Gale solves mysteries with poetic insight and his Father Brown solves them with more of a dramatic sense, placing himself right into the character of the unknown killer in order to know him well.
It’s delightful to read Chesterton’s own comments about art in the light of what he accomplished through art himself.
[su_pullquote align=”right”]”…the artist is a person who communicates something…the moment of creation is the moment of communication. It is when the work has passed from mind to mind that it becomes a work of art.”[/su_pullquote]
[su_pullquote align=”right”]”What is now needed most is intensive imagination. I mean the power to turn our imaginations inwards, on the things we already have, and to make those things live. It is not merely seeking new experiences, which rapidly become old experiences. It is really learning how to experience our experiences. It is learning how to enjoy our enjoyments.”[/su_pullquote]
As a member of the permanent community of a Catholic college campus center, I designed an intensive workshop for college students based on my experience helping with student papers and dissertations. I address the weaknesses I’ve observed, and give a structural model for the design of thesis papers. This workshop is most effective if I […]
FREE Parent Education Opportunity for Homeschoolers!! I’m getting ready for the 2017 Conference: Homeschooling to Rock the World and The Intellectual Life. This offer I made for you last year still stands! I am available to give FREE Parent Education presentations for small groups. Get the pdf here. Related
The artist has in common with his Creator a desire to realize ideas in form. Those ideas may be inspired by observation of nature, life experience, Liturgy, other works of art, pain and suffering, hopes and dreams, but ultimately spring from the touch of the Holy Spirit. What we observe about the process and results […]
For an Apostles of the Interior Life Women’s Retreat, where the theme was “The King Desires Your Beauty,” I prepared this truly interesting talk. Will you believe me when I say that this is another of my favorites?!?! I know, I’ve said that about a lot of these talks, but revisiting them to give a […]
Poetic Reading is not just reading poetry! Poetic Reading cultivates the wholeness of the reader, because it engages her whole being. Instead of a (sometimes disconnected) verbal intellect operating on words (a narrow slice of our interior capacity), it is an integrated sensory-intellectual-affective person focused to receive experience and tuned to resonate with it! I […]
One of my all-time favorite teaching experiences was a five-day poetry intensive for middle-school homeschoolers. I wrote a book just to get ready for this one, and hope to do it all over again some time. Meanwhile, I’ve adapted the material for parents, and for a high school classroom, and enjoyed those venues, too. For […]
Catholic Artists Conference in Omaha Here’s the abstract from the talk I was scheduled to give (sadly, the conference was cancelled). Related
Related
“The Merry Drinker,” by Frans Hals This is a portrait of an unnamed man, called in the title only ‘a merry drinker’. Related
Do You Suffer from PERS?!?!? In a recent talk – Home Schooling to Rock the World – I mentioned some symptoms that a person may be suffering from ‘post-Enlightenment reduction syndrome,’ (PERS) or ‘flattening’. This is the atrophy of one’s analogic sense – a reduction in the metaphoric dimension of human being. The problem is […]
I once asked a friend who calls herself a Jewish-Catholic if it had been hard for her to accept Mary’s role in Salvation History. She laughed and said, “Heck no! Every Sabbath was begun by a Jewish mama’s prayers! I’d have been suspicious if Lord Sabbaoth hadn’t come through a woman.” Jewish women welcomed Sabbath […]
How do you get from three wishes to magnifying God to lions and seeds and Holy-Holy-Holy to rubber bands, balls and balloons?? Well, I’ll tell you! You ask for this talk. It’s a lot of fun to give, and very hard to sum up in a short precis. I’m giving a picture of the glorious […]
Here’s a recommendation for a book I read aloud with my kids – Moccasin Trail, by Eloise Jarvis McGraw: Related
Women raising children stand in a very powerful place as the mediator of reality. We are great at being womb-and-placentas for our babies. We do fairly well at providing a home life that expands their contact with the wider world. We must also be, like a healthy cell wall, a semi-permeable boundary controlling incoming intellectual, […]
