Author: Deal Hudson

Seeking a New Visual Literacy

The demands on our “visual literacy,” as it is called, have multiplied exponentially. One 2013 study found that Americans spend 32 hours per week online, while the average global user spends 16 hours. That’s 19% of all the hours in a week, including time devoted to sleeping. If you subtract, say, 7 sleeping hours, the percentage becomes 27% for all waking hours, over one quarter of our waking time!

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A Parable About Beauty

“Beauty, indeed, does come through the eyes, and it is beheld by the senses, that is true,” said the priest. “But it’s not subjective, no more subjective than truth or goodness, which come from God through his creation. Beauty, too, was part of His creation, because God Himself is perfect Beauty.”

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Evangelizing Through the Culture — A Manifesto

How to describe something that is all around you, influencing you during every waking hour, perhaps while sleeping as well. Culture is like that, like the air you breath but completely unaware, unless you are choking. That’s precisely why I am raising the issue of culture directly, because to a great degree it is choking us, doing us harm without our knowing it.

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When Catholics Lost Their Cultural Clout

It was by “crying wolf” too often at important, well-made films, the Legion and its supporters became irrelevant. A simple, one-sentence summary of The Miracle certainly makes the condemnation sound plausible: A poor shepherdess named Nanni who believes herself to be the Virgin Mary is seduced with liquor drink by a wanderer whom she thinks is St. Joseph, played by director and co-writer Federico Fellini.

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Soundtrack Suggestions for Christmas

It’s not too far-fetched to say that film music has been the ‘classical music’ for far more listeners than the music played symphony halls around the world for the past fifty years. The time has come to claim to not merely admit it, but to celebrate the music and musicians who have continued to minister to the human ear, and the human heart.

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