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Go by Duncan G. Stroik
We need a new Counter-Reformation in sacred art and architecture. What was the Reformation’s
SUBSCRIBE effect? First, it preached iconoclasm, the rejection of the human figure in religious art. Second, it
Only $9.50 per year. reoriented worship, so that people gathered round the pulpit rather than the altar and the baptismal
Subscribe Now font became more important than the tabernacle. At the same time, it lessened the distinction
between the clergy and the laity, creating more equality and decreasing hierarchy.

Except the Lord Build the House: Restoring a Sense of Beauty

by Anthony Esolen
The men who built the cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres did not have diesel engines, or
lightweight metals like soft aluminum or firm titanium, or steel girders. The men who built
Europe’s greatest Gothic church did not have cranes that could tower a hundred feet in the air
without toppling, while lifting pre-formed blocks of concrete. They did not have computer models.
They did not have the calculus. Most of them assuredly could not read.

THE CHURCH Beijing’s “New” Cathedral: Renewal of a Classical Monument

by Anthony E. Clark
BUILDING AS A
When we build,” John Ruskin famously remarked in The Lamp of Memory, “let it not be for
SACRED PLACE
present delights nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for,
by Duncan G. Stroik
and let us think ... that men will say, as they look upon the labor and the wrought substance of
them, ‘See! This our fathers did for us!’” The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Beijing is
undertaking a substantial restoration and renovation of its most famous church, the Xishiku North
Cathedral, in a way that would have contented Ruskin’s sensibilities.

Continuity in Purpose: Warsaw after World War II

by Marcus van der Meulen
Most of Warsaw’s historic places of worship are post-war renovations, and several are even
reconstructions. The reconstruction of Warsaw, once described by the historian Robert Harbison as
Buy Now the “largest war memorial,” is the most comprehensive attempt to rebuild a past reality. The
reconstruction of churches was an essential part of it.

Backing Beauty
by The Rt Hon John Hayes
Truth is an absolute. And beauty the means by which it is revealed to us in its most comprehensible
form. In John Keats’ words: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all
ye need to know.” Through our connection with beauty, we enjoy a taste of the sublime and both an
escape from and a compensation for the inevitable pains and trials of daily life.

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