Entries Tagged 'Blog' ↓

Karate and Whatnot from VA makes this complaint:

Oh, and I can’t check Veith’s blog during lunch at work any more - it’s blocked by the company filters for having “adult/sexual content”! ROTFLOL! That’s GOT to be an IP-based filter instead of content-based! Anyway, my veneer just got thinner!

How can that be? We had the same problem here at Patrick Henry College, no less!, the filters blocking this blog. I’m wondering if there is some word posted somewhere that is triggering this, but I really am trying to be as pure as pure can be, above reproach and all that. And I hate the thought of losing readers to these filters.

Does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with this? (tODD, thanks for letting me know about the spam filter Akismet. It’s working beautifully against that problem.)

This blog has experienced a huge surge of visits, beginning on Monday, so that we are getting almost twice as many as we were getting the previous week. I don’t know why that is, but I’m very grateful and want to welcome one and all.

One new reader came to us out of curiosity about an article that I wrote, which struck him because I talked about “Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Andy Warhol & Paris Hilton all in the same few short paragraphs.” That pretty much describes the scope of our topics on this blog. Well, those folks and Christ.

For new readers, I just want to point out that the best part of this particular blog is the discussions that we provoke. Read the comments and notice how illuminating the discussions back and forth can be. Note the high level of discourse, which sometimes gets heated but seldom degenerates into the nastiness of so many other blogs. We have different opinions here, but also genuine Christian charity for each other (at least most of the time–we keep working on that). This is to say, what you have come to in this blog is something like a virtual community, and we welcome you and encourage your participation.

So new readers, stick around, bookmark us, comment, and come back often. This is a weekday blog, so we make no new posts on the weekends. But when there aren’t any, browse the previous entries and the archives, where some of the discussions are still going on.

I have put together something of a sequence today, going from Good Friday, through some of our usual kinds of topics, to Easter.

MAY YOU ALL, NEW READERS AND OLD, HAVE BLESSED HOLY DAYS AS YOU CONTEMPLATE OUR LORD’S CROSS AND HIS EMPTY TOMB.

The artist, that is, not the blog. A big tip of the beret to Paul McCain’s Cyberbrethren for alerting me to this story from England about a big Lucas Cranach exhibit at the Royal Academy. The art critic goes on and on about the creativity, the “unruly talent,” and the darting imagination of Luther’s crony at Wittenberg. From “Cranach’s flashes of inspiration” in the London Times Online :

The fantastical religious paintings that surround The Martyrdom of St Catherine in the first outburst of his career confirm the impression that a momentous and unruly talent has been unleashed. Familiar subjects - the Crucifixion, the stigmatisation of St Francis - are reinvented outrageously by an artist determined not to do anything the way others did it. If the religious convolutions in the foregrounds are too complex for you, there are always the backgrounds to enjoy. Cranach was a superb landscapist who always set his biblical duels in recognisable stretches of Upper Franconia, where tottering Harry Potter castles wobble atop mysterious riverside crags.

Because his imagination darted about so much, there wasn’t much he didn’t try. There are portraits, altarpieces, bits of contemporary genre pictures that tug your heartstrings and ones that make you laugh. His woodcuts throb and squirm with events, like an angler’s worm tin. And a gorgeous nocturnal Nativity sets him the tough task of painting candlelit reflections at night. Nowhere does his art settle on a standard look.

Darting from one thing to another, tugging your heart strings, making you laugh, throbbing and squirming with events, religious convolutions, biblical duels. Maybe that DOES describe this blog in his honor!

We haven’t heard from him for awhile. I hope he is OK.

it’s probably because it includes a bunch of links. For some reason, this blog software flags such comments and puts them in a “moderation” queue that I have to approve. I do approve them, but it might take awhile for them to appear. So that’s what’s happening if you make a comment and it doesn’t appear immediately. But don’t let that slow you down. Again, I think the comments and the discussions that get going are the best part of this blog.

Well, Ed Muskie cried in New Hampshire, which finished his campaign; Hillary Clinton cried in New Hampshire, which saved her campaign. This means we can expect more “passion” in the primaries ahead, God help us.

OK, you can probably tell what I think of Mrs. Clinton, as well as some of the other candidates. But, despite our indulgence in political punditry, the Cranach blog is not endorsing any of them. I mean, mobilizing the vast Cranach army with our precinct-by-precinct organization, could turn the election, and that would not be fair to the other candidates. But a presidential election raises so many issues about the intersections of culture, Christianity, and vocation that it is perfect fodder for this blog.

So we’ll look at many facets of these candidates and the issues they raise, for better or worse. And I’ll need your help as we all make up our minds.

Thanks to Aardvark Alley for bestowing on this blog the coveted Golden Aardvark Award for our Christmas re-runs. This entitles the honoree (and we were one of many) to proudly display this emblem: