Reading Time: 3 minutes This weekend, I went to one of the 600+ nationwide protests against our fascist presidential administration’s policy of splitting up families at the border. This one was held at the Rockville Centre train station on Long Island. It was a blazing hot day, but the crowd was large – I’m guessing about 400 to 500 […]
Photography
Posted inGeneral
Photo Monday: A Weekend in Hudson
Reading Time: 3 minutes I was on a mini-vacation this weekend in Hudson, N.Y., a pleasant little upstate town that used to be an industrial center and is reinventing itself as a hipster tourist mecca. I spent the weekend relaxing rather than writing, but I did take a few pictures: Stopped off along the way in Kingston, another delightful […]
Posted inGeneral
The Fountainhead: City of God
Reading Time: 5 minutes There’s more than one kind of religious architecture.
Posted inGeneral
Photo Sunday: Open House
Reading Time: 2 minutes Since I’m reviewing The Fountainhead, I thought this was highly appropriate to photograph. It’s an art exhibit in Central Park called Open House, consisting of baroque concrete chairs, sofas and arches that are duplicates of those that once adorned a famous Gilded Age ballroom. Ayn Rand’s modernist hero Howard Roark, with his insistence that anything […]
Posted inGeneral
Photo Sunday: Green Mountains
Reading Time: 2 minutes If you like maple syrup, craft beer, rugged mountains and forests, picturesque small towns, real farm-to-table eating, or cultural liberalism, Vermont is the place. Here are a few pictures from my trip to the state two weeks ago: Hiking around Kent Pond, Killington, VT. The sun kept hiding behind clouds and coming out again, creating […]
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Photo Sunday: Sakura
Reading Time: 2 minutes After a rainy, gloomy week where I live, the sun finally came out and the weather warmed up, and every plant and tree seems to have burst into bloom overnight. That includes these cherry trees, which exploded in dense bunches of pink flowers as if staging a fireworks display to usher in the spring: I […]
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Photo Sunday: Ecstatic
Reading Time: < 1 minute One thing we can relearn from babies is the way they live and feel entirely in the present, untroubled by the past, unanxious about the future. Capturing this one transcendent moment of happiness, I was reminded of a quote: “The word ‘infant’ is derived from the Latin word for ‘unable to speak,’ but you’ll be […]
Posted inReligion
Why Christian Art Sucks: BYU Boogaloo.
Reading Time: 9 minutes We’ve noted in the past (extensively, really) that Christian media sucks. And their preferences for visual art are no exception. Waverly Giles tried to make something that was off the beaten track, something that might challenge the viewer a little more than the usual Olan Mills-style portrait sitting or awkward family photo, and she got smacked hard for her impertinence.
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Photo Sunday: Sign of Spring
Reading Time: < 1 minute “Winter never dies. Not as people die. It hangs on in late frost and the smell of autumn in a summer evening, and in the heat it flees to the mountains. Summer never dies. It sinks into the ground; in the depths, winter buds form in sheltered places and white shoots creep under dead leaves.” […]
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Photo Sunday: Titanosaur
Reading Time: < 1 minute I spent this weekend doing some cultural stuff in New York City, including a visit to the American Museum of Natural History to see their new exhibit: the skeleton of an enormous dinosaur from Argentina, one of the largest ever discovered. This species is so new it doesn’t even have a proper scientific name yet, […]