Serving Him in Whom we live and move and have our being …

… The Catholic Artist in a Neo-Pagan Age | Church Life Journal | University of Notre Dame. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It is my argument that the Christian artist must implicitly begin, as Mariani insistently begins, in the interior self-knowledge that springs forth on the lips of the Christian as testimony, confession, martyrdom. But we have also to re-explain the age to itself, to re-teach it, that is, to trust in the capacity of reason to grasp the truth and to treat its wide ranging inquiries not as a collection of amusing baubles, but as clues to salvation. We have to re-teach the age to trust the light of being, already before its eyes, for only then may the transformative word of the cross make an entrance.[10] And so, Paul’s speech in the Areopagus is not failed rhetoric, but the very model of our rhetoric, re-awakening our auditor to what it already in some way knows and then, by bearing witness to the cross, deepening that knowledge, before at last fulfilling it with something categorically new, the revelation of the face of Christ.