{"id":188734,"date":"2026-01-08T17:40:52","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T23:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/?p=188734"},"modified":"2026-01-08T17:40:52","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T23:40:52","slug":"beauty-and-catholicism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/beauty-and-catholicism\/","title":{"rendered":"Beauty and Catholicism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.palladiummag.com\/2025\/12\/12\/the-obligation-to-beauty\/\" target=\"_blank\">Point<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Because of Catholicism\u2019s insistence on beauty as a theological necessity, as a manifestation of divine order in sensible form, it has, surprisingly, sometimes even been adopted by gay creatives from Oscar Wilde in the 19th Century, Karl Lagerfeld in the 20th, to Dolce and Gabbana today. The elaborate liturgy, the vestments, the architecture, the music; these weren\u2019t decorations applied to worship but constituted worship itself. Beauty was the form truth took when it entered the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/firstthings.com\/why-creators-convert\/\" target=\"_blank\">Counterpoint<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Many of the characters in <em>Converts<\/em>, like Graham Greene, explicitly characterized their Catholicism as intellectually rather than emotionally motivated. Lord Alfred Douglas claimed that \u201cThe ritual, although I had always liked it and thought it beautiful, did not influence me in the very slightest degree\u201d; Maurice Baring was \u201cless interested in the aesthetic aspects of the faith . . . than in the rational arguments\u201d and declared that \u201ccandles and incense never did . . . affect me\u201d; Evelyn Waugh, according to his friend Christopher Sykes, had a \u201crational\u201d approach to his faith, \u201cremarkable for a lack of emotion\u201d; similarly, Muriel Spark insisted that her faith was \u201cdogmatic rather than emotional.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Point: Because of Catholicism\u2019s insistence on beauty as a theological necessity, as a manifestation of divine order in sensible form, it has, surprisingly, sometimes even been adopted by gay creatives from Oscar Wilde in the 19th Century, Karl Lagerfeld in the 20th, to Dolce and Gabbana today. The elaborate liturgy, the vestments, the architecture, the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/beauty-and-catholicism\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Beauty and Catholicism&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholicism","category-culture-and-anti-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xam3-N66","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188734"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188736,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188734\/revisions\/188736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}