Trouble in the Diocese is a petulant, funny book of poetry. Its contrary protagonist/antagonist, the Apprentice, embraces life in both the large and the absurdly small. At the same time, he emphatically rejects the easy rigidity of doily-headed orthodox Catholics as well as the impulse in the Catholic literary Pixar world that seeks to serve two masters. Jesus and his Church are lifted up here, but so is the cross. Discipleship necessarily involves dis-ease, purgation, and if we as readers have...
How the transformation of social media platforms and user-experience have redefined the entertainment industry [b][/b] In a little over a decade, competing social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, have given rise to a new creative industry: social media entertainment. Operating at the intersection of the entertainment and interactivity, communication and content industries, social media entertainment creators have harnessed these platforms to...
In the last twenty years, Orthodox Catholics have come to expect their art to be necessarily about beauty. They expect it always and everywhere to lift one up, to be tinged with, to linger in the dimly-lit rooms of old-moneyed Europe, to be passed around among the best families, among like-minded gnostics, generous Jansenists. But these expectations have nothing to do with reality. In fact, most of the real contributions during the postmodern period have come from blue-collar poets–influenced by...
Though we are all sorry sinners, not worthy to sing God's praises, we must. The trick is to not let concerns for «Christian stealth» transform us into poets who end up serving a second master. «Platform» has its draw, but we can't let a wide concern for Catholic culture become no culture at all. We can't be so concerned with success that our poems lose their distinguishing content. Jesus is Lord of all the earth. Using a conversational style lifted from Collins and Coleridge,...
The work of a wonderful secular poet, Billy Collins, provides a great model for Christian writers. His Coleridge «conversation poems» allow for real play and comedy, all in the service of profundity. These are veins that have not been suitably mined by poets who have access to the larger humanity that only Jesus can provide. But there's more than comedy in this collection. The Sorrows of Mary offer a sober truth, as do the four Gospel sonnets; both sections provide a bracing interlude...
