Executive Orders Don’t Make Buildings Beautiful
A draft executive order has recently riled up the architectural community. Entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” it points out the ugliness in a number of modern architectural movements...
View ArticleRise of the Scops: Wonder After the Pandemic
It was Virginia Woolf who wryly observed, “On or about December 1910, human character changed.”[1] I had no idea what this meant, until I stumbled into a fairy wood where a gilded volume by W.B. Yeats...
View ArticleOn Diligence
I was the sort of teenager who studied too much Latin. I was homeschooled, then, and lonely. We lived in Rome. I had no friends. I read books off my mother’s shelves for most subjects — textbooks, and...
View ArticleBeauty Spots
…When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all...
View ArticleNot for Bread Alone: Notes on Good Work
On a number of the shelves in my home sit baskets that I have made myself. I took up the craft out of a need for contrast in what is a largely abstract existence, mostly consisting of reading and...
View ArticleThe Dogma of Minimalist Drama
In his comedy sketch about “Stuff,” George Carlin joked that the whole meaning of life can be described as “Trying to find a place to put your stuff!” After all, that’s what a house is: it’s a “place...
View ArticleThe Ordinary Beauty of Flower Bouquets
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing – to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from.” – Till We Have Faces As I type this I’m staring at a bouquet of...
View ArticleLearning to See with Norman Wirzba
Soon after we moved to Australia, my family hiked in a temperate rainforest in the Yarra Ranges, an hour-and-a-half from our house. Southern Victoria is home to several of these rainforests. They...
View ArticleWhy Our Churches Should Be Beautiful
In the last few decades, American churches have gotten a new look—but don’t call it a facelift. Instead, think of it more as a toning-down, as church exteriors have ridden themselves of their steeples...
View ArticleTeaching Children to See
This past winter, my six-year-old began each day looking out the window. I would hear him roll out of bed, feet hit the floor, his footsteps moving toward one of the windows in his room. I knew what he...
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