Sit with me at one table / The same for ancestor and grandson / The future is being accomplished now [….] And even now, in these coming times / I stand up in the stirrups like a child. (Arseny Tarkovsky, “Life Life”) Biblical faith is based on experience of God in history, although biblical Hebrew, paradoxically, does not have a word to designate “history,” the course of events that is progressively studied and written down. The language of the Bible...
Imagination, the engine of history Imagination is a theme that, in the course of recent decades, has become more and more the object of discussion, not only in literary and artistic terms, but also in historiographic, scientific and interpretative ones, since it is considered as the true driving force of the journey of humanity. This is the theme addressed in a powerful new book by Francesco Monico.[1] The author picks up on Jonathan Gottschall’s research on storytelling, in which the...
The best description of today’s cultural reality is through “authenticity,” so says Charles Taylor, one of the most important contemporary Catholic intellectuals.[1] There exists a true “culture of authenticity.” By this term the philosopher means the search for personal self-fulfillment supported by the subjective principle of being faithful to what one sincerely feels. Behind this quest stands the moral ideal of “being true to oneself.” This ideal, Taylor asserts, is not to be defined according to what we desire or...
We present a classic of the spirituality of the Society of Jesus: Peter Faber’s Spiritual Memoirs, commonly known as his Memoriale, or, to give it its full title, The Memoir of some good desires and good thoughts of Father Master Peter Faber.[1] The external man At the time of origin of the Society of Jesus, Peter Faber was the first “companion” of St. Ignatius of Loyola (i.e., the first who was called to the idea and convinced by it) and...
After the one-man theater tour Springsteen on Broadway (2018) and the studio album Western Stars (2019), Bruce Springsteen returned to the studio to record a musical work that is as complex as it is immediate, called Letter to You (2020). Observing the genesis of this album, we can see how it is full of strong dynamic tensions with elements that could be considered in tension or contradictory. In fact, in the era of large productions and myriad technological possibilities, in...
Jordi Savall is one of the most important contemporary viola da gamba players, a conductor and musicologist. Above all he is an itinerant musician, philologist and complete artist. His journeys furrow the paths of history, rediscovering obscure scores and forgotten musical instruments to let ancient sounds re-emerge from the past causing that fascination only great art can inspire. Like many of his colleagues, Savall began his musical studies when he was very young. By the age of six he was...
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