November 2008 Archives

Margaret Cabaniss, at insidecatholic.com, joins Vanity Fair's Paul Cullum in sniffing at the work of decorative painter Thomas Kinkade.

On the one hand, I have to admit his stuff is not great art. It's dreamy, nostalgic, sentimental, formulaic, and escapist. So what? It's decorative. On that score, at least it's better than a painting made of elephant droppings.

I'm not a fan of his works by any means, but it bothers me to see good writers fall into the snobbery attached to most criticism of Kinkade.

Vanity Fair and other elites would ignore Thomas Kinkade altogether but for one reason: he portrays Protestant Christian small-town America as a comforting milieu, whereas the elites insist that it was oppressive to the core.

It's good to hear that Copernicus' grave has been located in the cathedral in Frombork (Poland). The Polish side of my family is from his birthplace Toruń, where he is the local hero, giving his name to a university and some other cultural institutions.

Professor Ed Peters mentions a detail I hadn't known before: not only was the astronomer a deacon, he was a canon lawyer with a JCD from the University of Ferrara.

Boston City Hall has been rated the "ugliest building on the planet" in a survey on a travel web site:

A national travel Web site is telling the world what many Bostonians already know - City Hall is ugly.

VirtualTourist.com put City Hall atop its list of the ugliest buildings on the planet, based on a poll of the site's editors and readers.

The California site offered a sharp-tongued assessment of the Hub's center of power.

"While it was hip for it's time, this concrete structure now gets routinely criticized for its dreary facade and incongruity with the rest of the city's more genteel architecture. Luckily, it's very close to more aesthetically pleasing attractions."

What can you expect when the architectural style is called Brutalism? That sounds like something invented in Mordor.

Really, I'm not sure that City Hall deserved the title. I bet the people conducting the survey didn't even know about this competitor, an airplane hangar -- I mean, UFO -- I mean, parish church -- in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Update: Eric Ewanco reminds me of another very strong candidate, St. Malachy Church in Burlington, MA. He writes:

Just for the record, the roof at Sacred Heart looks like aluminum rather than glass. St. Malachy's deserves extra points for its interior: the sloping walls of the exterior paraboloid shape have the same slope within the church, giving sensitive parishioners the impression that the whole building might collapse on them at any time. If that doesn't draw hearts and minds to God, what does?

Catholics probe aid directed to ACORN The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has hired forensic accounting specialists to investigate more than $1 million in church funding to voter-registration group ACORN, fearing the money may have been spent in partisan or fraudulent ways that could jeopardize the church's tax-exempt status.

The investigation is "thorough, serious and ongoing," according to a July 11 letter to more than 200 bishops from New Orleans Bishop Robert Morin, chairman of the committee that oversees the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

The CCHD sent $1,037,000 to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in 2007, including a $40,000 grant to an ACORN affiliate in Las Vegas that was raided last month by the Nevada attorney general's office in a voter-fraud probe. ...full story

A huge on-line compilation of Catholic texts.

Where else would I have found St. Odilo of Cluny's life of St. Adelaide, the empress?