For the past two weeks, I've been writing about the opportunity to make a new Catholic culture, not from scratch and not from attempts to appropriate whatever happens to be popular at the moment, but from the immense resources available in the tradition we engage at Wyoming Catholic College. These resources are not just in the past, of course, but very much in the present: the encounter with God in silence, the experience of the desert, the evidence of beauty.
Are there reasons for hope? Certainly. Bad as things are in the culture at large, genuine renewal can begin at any moment, in any time. Who could have predicted the career (unknown to the literary world in his day) of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the Victorian era of doubt, or who could have anticipated Flannery O'Connor in the Freud-obsessed and existential 1950s and early 1960s? Who can say what is already underway now? Hopkins and O'Connor remind us that making art—in this case poetry and fiction—is a mode of revealing the world in new ways.
Read Full Article »