Category Archives: Love What Lasts

This often happens: a taste or two into a $15 bottle of red, I think, “This is so good, I should go back and buy a case.” And yet, halfway through the second glass, I think, “This is actually a bit too sweet to be all that interesting.” It is easy to confuse sweetness, whichContinue reading “Love What Lasts: Wine”

On June 9, at 8:00pm EST, I am delivering “Reconciling Beauty and Progress,” a free webinar for newsletter subscribers to GibbsClassical.com.   Beauty is rightly understood as an overflow, a surplus, and a gratuity. Beauty contributes nothing to our survival. Beauty is luxury and privilege. On the other hand, progress is now a cultural pursuit typically associatedContinue reading “Free Webinar: Reconciling Beauty and Progress”

“In the first few years I wrote for FilmFisher, I believed a position of lenience and generosity toward a work of art was necessary to truly understand it. However, while I was writing generous film reviews, I was also teaching Dante and Jane Austen, and eventually I came to the rather obvious conclusion that itContinue reading “Some Art Warrants A Generous Audience And Some Does Not”

“While progressives have great contempt for the past, they often have a more accurate sense of the past’s worth than conservatives do. Naïve and unrefined conservatives are sometimes willing to sell off huge tracts of the past at cut rates, but progressives who buy up the past never underestimate its worth. Because traditional things areContinue reading “Heirlooms”

On the evening of Thursday, April 22nd, at 8:00pm EST, I will give a lecture entitled “How Should Christians Watch Movies?” The lecture will include readings from Love What Lasts, my forthcoming book from The CiRCE Institute. As per usual, the lecture will not be recorded. While there is a good deal of conversation amongContinue reading “Lecture: How Should Christians Watch Movies?”

“Modern beliefs about politics, church government, democracy, and so forth are all neatly and appropriately reflected in modern literature, modern music, and modern liturgies. We do not deserve a better culture than the one we have. Every culture is perfectly suited to the music it produces, the churches it builds, and the poems it writes.Continue reading “Bad Taste Is Its Own Punishment”

“While some Christians still prefer worldview analysis as a cultural hermeneutic, worldview analysis has largely been replaced by cultural engagement. With the ascendance of Emergent Christianity in the years following the World Trade Center attacks, worldview reductionism fell out of fashion and young Christian essayists and bloggers adopted a softer approach to analyzing secular films.Continue reading “Free Lecture: Love What Lasts”

I find Velazquez’s waterseller one of the noblest, most inspiring men ever painted.