{"id":395,"date":"2009-04-05T22:13:19","date_gmt":"2009-04-05T22:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/illuminations-of-faith.html"},"modified":"2009-04-05T22:13:19","modified_gmt":"2009-04-05T22:13:19","slug":"illuminations-of-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/illuminations-of-faith.html","title":{"rendered":"Illuminations of Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

Also via dotCommonweal, two posts from Father Joseph Komonchak, a church historian at Catholic University of America and a man with a keen eye and pen: <\/p>\n


\n\"christ-on-abrahams-lap.jpg\"<\/span>The first<\/a> regards an article in the Washington Post<\/em><\/a> on an exhibit at the National Gallery of medieval illuminated pages:<\/p>\n

\n

“These pages are like reliquaries,” the reviewer writes, “those golden jeweled boxes with small rock-crystal windows in which the Church preserved the fingernails of saints. The flawless hides, the thin sheets of gold glued to them, the pure blue of the Virgin’s robe (from powdered lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan) and the sheer quality of the painting weren’t just signs of wealth, they were signs of veneration. What was written on the vellum — the law, the founding documents, the revealed word of God — was more valuable by far.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If this one, showing Christ on the lap of Abraham, is any indication, it’s worth a trip. It runs through Aug. 2, which is enough time. BTW, the late librarian of the Vatican, Fr. Leonard Boyle, OP, was a man with a mischievous sense of humor, but to make a point. He used to scandalize colleagues at the library and in the profession by proposing that they tear pages out of some of the great manuscripts and send them around on exhibit. “Nobody will ever read them or see them if they stay stuck in here!” he’d say.<\/p>\n

Fr. Komonchak’s second art-related post<\/a> is a real eye-popper–it is about the art of Eastern Europe made available to Western eyes since the collapse of the USSR. <\/p>\n

\n

“One of these is the high altar in the Church of St. James in Levo?<\/font>a in eastern Slovakia,” Komonchak writes. “It was carved by the school of an artist known as Master Paul, about whom not a great deal is known except that he lived in the town at the turn of the sixteenth century. Above [actually below in this post] is the Last Supper he carved out of wood. It is said that he put the faces of his fellow citizens on the apostles who are pictured very naturalistically. Note the two at the opposite ends of the table, one stuffing his face with bread, the other drinking. The beloved disciple rests his head on the table in front of Jesus.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 
\n\"Last<\/span><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Also via dotCommonweal, two posts from Father Joseph Komonchak, a church historian at Catholic University of America and a man with a keen eye and pen: The first regards an article in the Washington Post on an exhibit at the National Gallery of medieval illuminated pages: “These pages are like reliquaries,” the reviewer writes, “those golden jeweled…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nIlluminations of Faith - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/illuminations-of-faith.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Illuminations of Faith - 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}