Donald Sheehan, The Grace of Incorruption – Book Review
Editor’s Note: Donald Sheehan, whom I knew in the last years of his life, truly lived and breathed liturgical poetry. He awoke long before dawn and prayed the psalter for hours each day, developing a rare and profound linguistic and spiritual understanding of it. Ultimately, he wrote his own translation, The Psalms of David, which…
Continue reading »Reliquary of St-Vincent of Zaragoza
For many years I had wanted to design some liturgical work involving cloisonné, so I was delighted when Father Andrey Kordochkin of the Russian Orthodox Church of St Mary Magdalene approached me to make a reliquary for St Vincent of Zaragoza. In the cloisonné technique, thin wire is laid onto plate, usually of silver or…
Continue reading »Talks from 5th Annual Climacus Conference now Online
The 5th Annual Climacus Conference was held last weekend in Louisville, KY, organized around the theme of Beauty. I had the honor of giving two talks – one on Orthodox church architecture, and the other on liturgical art. All the talks are available as audio files on Ancient Faith Radio, and I highly recommend…
Continue reading »An Interview with Iconographer Federico José Xamist
Federico José Xamist is a remarkably talented young iconographer of whom we have recently become aware. His work exemplifies icon painting as a fresh and living tradition. We offer the following interview to introduce this exciting artist to our readers: Gould: Federico, you grew up in Chile. How did you come to live in Greece? J. Xamist: When I…
Continue reading »On History and Tradition: A Review of Cappella Romana’s “Good Friday in Jerusalem”
For makers of music, history, by its mere existence, presents challenges. A recent headline in the Onion ran, “Nation’s Historians Warn The Past Is Expanding At Alarming Rate.” While we can smile at the joke, there’s a way in which the specter of an “ever-enlarging past” does really keep musicians up at night. Every Western composer since Beethoven has…
Continue reading »Contemporary Art as Theophany
To-day in England we think as little of art as though we had been caught up from earth and set in some windy side street of the universe among the stars. Disgust at the daily deathbed which is Europe has made us hunger and thirst for the kindly ways of righteousness, and we want to save our souls.…
Continue reading »The Two Russias : Leviathan and The Island
To anyone who thinks that the Lives of the Saints have little practical application to our everyday life, I humbly beg to differ. To prove my point, I would like to offer some personal reflections on the new Russian film Leviathan, a film that would seem to be almost irredeemably bleak. But if considered in…
Continue reading »Byzanfest, an Orthodox short-film festival.
Chris Vlahonasios is the founder and director of Byzanfest, the first online festival of Orthodox short films. He is also a blogger at Orthodox Filmmakers and Artists. I interviewed him about how all of this came about and about his view of the possible relationships between Orthodox arts and film. Along the way one…
Continue reading »The problem of art in Anglophone Orthodoxy: a review essay
Recently, an online exchange about public outreach efforts with respect to various aspects of Orthodox music and music of Orthodox composers led the following comment by a discussant: What exactly is so “Orthodox” about any kind of pure music? […] [T]o associate any composer with the Church is an empty exercise, since music has only…
Continue reading »Woodwork for a Coptic Church in America
I have recently had the pleasure of making an altar set for a Coptic church. This project was somewhat of a challenge for me because the Coptic Church and her liturgical art is not my area of expertise. I had to learn about both the liturgical implements and the historical styles of woodwork unique to…
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