Wishing all our readers a blessed Christmas. And go easy on the stuffing, because there’s some serious reading coming up after Christmas.
Photo by CL. Minneapolis, Minnesota
Bad Catholic did some posts a while back on the unique appreciation humans have for beauty, with a follow-up that I also recommend you read.
Also, the seven habits of people who place radical trust in God is worth reading.
As for beauty, I have long held the philosophy that things should either be useful or beautiful, hopefully both, but at least one of these things. I remember thinking back when I first heard “All This Useless Beauty” that Elvis Costello got it all wrong, although I do like the song as songs go. He manages, like a typical halfway intelligent post-modernist, to sound rather clever with his gift for a turn of phrase, but I say to him that there is no such thing as useless beauty. To be honest, I’m not sure what he’s even trying to say except perhaps that “stuff used to be good, but now it sucks, and the beauty of the past is useless because it’s been degraded by modernity.” Is that what he’s saying? Anyway, I never liked the idea of calling beauty useless, because it’s in beauty that we see the eternal – the eternal human capacity to appreciate it as well as the universal eternal God, from which we get that capacity.
Life without beauty, wherever we may find it, is not worth living. When I think of it, I like to try to capture little things of beauty that often get missed in the rush by taking my camera out with me – it helps me to look for those things. Sometimes it’s nice not to try to capture, but I also like the act of stopping that one is forced to do when one is in capture mode. I try to do it when I don’t have the camera with me too and it’s why I like to take breaks from carrying it, lest I become too obsessed with being in capture mode, but I also like to share these things I see, so I may start doing that here a bit more often with the caveat that I’m no Ansel Adams or Elliot Erwitt, obviously.
Photo by CL
And here’s one more, since it’s everyone’s favourite topic: How Not To Have Sex.
CL
7man
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