Category Archive: RELIGION
Suddenly it’s Christmas
(photo by Prathyush Thomas)
Tidings of Comfort and Joy! Yes, Christmas is almost here! If you haven’t ordered the turkey, or booked the restaurant, you’ve missed out….
Continue Reading →20 September, 622
(photo by Noumenon)
On this day, the Prophet slipped out of Mecca and decamped to Medina. It was a bad day for a great religion; the day the Sword cut the cords of Compassion and Mercy. One day, Allah shall re-tie those knots, and there shall be The Peace! “Every hardship is followed by ease.”
Continue Reading →The Tyranny of Guilt
"Cain after Having Killed His Brother Abel" by Henri Vidal (photo of statue in the Tuileries Gardens by Oswaldo Bautista)
(Tyrannie de la pénitence) (Written by Pascal Bruckner) (Translated to English by Steven Rendall) This mordant, elegant addendum to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is as unscientific and intuitive as that fraudulent work of pseudo-science. But Bruckner’s book is far more valuable, in that it spurns false jargon and history-moralizing, concentrating on simple empiricism, clothed in prose poetry. Why are the fashionable elites of European progression so full of hate and contempt, so bent-out-of-shape by confected targets whilst missing real threats waving weapons in their faces? They emblematize the classic joke-image of the liberal seeing the other guy’s point of view…
Continue Reading →Not so nice in Nice
Constantin Meunier, "The Removal of the Cracked Melting Pot"
Bastille Day on the Côte d’Azur, and some truck-driving, rancorous loon has deliberately ploughed through the revelling crowd, killing 80 or more people and spreading terror. Driving through my town on a sunny day, listening to “Melting Pot” by Blue Mink, I can’t help feeling dazed and confused. We at The Varnished Culture prefer love to war, art to violence, culture to confusion, but it seems we can’t have column ‘A’ without column ‘B’. How about Voici à Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité! Anyway, while there is no credible evidence as to motivation yet, we can take a wild guess, we guess: see…
Continue Reading →Better Never Than Late
Joan gets the Call (by Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879)
July 7, 1456: an ecclesiastic court of appeal acquits Joan of Arc of all and any ‘crimes’. Only hitch: she’d been burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. Some French folks maintain that Jeanne d’Arc was the last thing the English cooked properly. George Bernard Shaw, who wrote Saint Joan (she was canonised in 1920), called her “the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages.” In GBS’s play, the final scene has King Charles VII of France encounter Joan in a dream, circa her successful appeal. He tells her:…
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