LEGATO...

Up until the mid-18th century, art functioned as an evolving yet relatively stable language of high culture with a vocabulary of conventional forms (style) and themes (subject matter) familiar both to artists and educated audiences. Because artists used vocabularies already familiar to their audiences, it was possible for them to say something significant and for art to have a serious place within a wider range of overlapping cultural forms and practices such as literature, music, theater, dance, religion, and political festivity. Like all forms of high culture, art also worked not just to reflect shared values but also to redefine them. As an active, creative, inventive force responding to individual patrons, artists, and new social circumstances, art provided a changing, flexible arena in which different social groups could interact, exchange and contest ideas, define new forms of group identity, and formulate new blueprints of "reality" and "maps" for human ex...

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil, God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." Dietrich Bonhoeffer   "It does not require a majority to prevail but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set bush fires in people's minds." - Samuel Adams "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson "If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.  There may be even a worse fate. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." - Winston Churchill

We are all very much aware of the problem of pedophilia within Roman Catholicism. It is my personal view that this problem emanates from the vast presence of homosexuals in the Church of Rome. This general suspicion is not new.   Homosexuals were occasionally condemned by medieval writers, especially monastic writers concerned about the sexual improprieties flourishing in all-male communities sworn to chastity. Citing early Christian authorities, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (1270-90) goes as far as to describe the annihilation of all “sodomites” on the night of Christ’s birth as one of a series of miraculous announcements of Christ’s birth. The writer enlists Jerome and Augustine for support, though no such statements can be traced to either.  “To these shepherds, then, an angel appeared, and announced to them the birth of the Savior, telling them also how they might find their way to Him. And they heard a multitude of angels singing, 'Glory to God in the highe...