{"id":1075,"date":"2006-06-15T22:58:09","date_gmt":"2006-06-15T22:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html"},"modified":"2006-06-15T22:58:09","modified_gmt":"2006-06-15T22:58:09","slug":"the-light-in-the-piazza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html","title":{"rendered":"The Light in the Piazza"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Did anyone else watch it on PBS this evening&#8230;harkening back to the days when PBS actually did something valuable via <em>Live from Lincoln Center<\/em>&#8230;where many of us got our most sustained initial exposure to opera?<\/p>\n<p>My father had seen it in New York a month ago (along with <em>Awake and Sing! <\/em>which features <em>Six Feet Under&#8217;s <\/em>Lauren Ambrose &#8211; he said she was very good, amid all the talkiness of 1930&#8217;s agitprop!) &#8211; and raved. I&#8217;d read about when the show first opened in Chicago several years ago and had thought &#8211; well, if I ever go to the theater again, this is one I&#8217;d like to see. <\/p>\n<p>What a moving, heartbreaking piece. Catholic me can&#8217;t help hearing spiritual echoes&nbsp; &#8211; of course, set a play in Italy, it&#8217;s hard to avoid. But all the stories about love found and lost that wove through the piece seemed to find their answer, such as it is, in all of its ambiguity, in the setting of a church, a church where the light that illuminates the piazza, the light that Clara sees and hopes for, penetrates all the pain, tragedy and loss and simply&#8230;shines. Accepted, accepting, hopeful. <\/p>\n<p>I was glad to see that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.broadwayworld.com\/showinfo.cfm?showid=2290\">a national tour of the show begins in August &#8211; hmmm&#8230;Cleveland and Cincinnati are close enough, but Indy would be better&#8230;we&#8217;ll see!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Did anyone else watch it on PBS this evening&#8230;harkening back to the days when PBS actually did something valuable via Live from Lincoln Center&#8230;where many of us got our most sustained initial exposure to opera? My father had seen it in New York a month ago (along with Awake and Sing! which features Six Feet&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Light in the Piazza - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Light in the Piazza - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Did anyone else watch it on PBS this evening&#8230;harkening back to the days when PBS actually did something valuable via Live from Lincoln Center&#8230;where many of us got our most sustained initial exposure to opera? My father had seen it in New York a month ago (along with Awake and Sing! which features Six Feet&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-06-15T22:58:09+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Light in the Piazza - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The Light in the Piazza - Via Media","og_description":"Did anyone else watch it on PBS this evening&#8230;harkening back to the days when PBS actually did something valuable via Live from Lincoln Center&#8230;where many of us got our most sustained initial exposure to opera? My father had seen it in New York a month ago (along with Awake and Sing! which features Six Feet&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2006-06-15T22:58:09+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html","name":"The Light in the Piazza - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2006-06-15T22:58:09+00:00","dateModified":"2006-06-15T22:58:09+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-light-in-the-piazza.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The Light in the Piazza"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}