In the past year, while worldwide lockdowns have been instituted for the preservation of life, many people have been forced to ponder anew what the value of it is: what, if anything, makes life ‘beautiful’? In the silence of our isolated homes, the call to find meaning—a call which has always been sounding in the background of society—has become more difficult for us to ignore.
Having recently joined the FiSch Blog team, I thought I should introduce myself properly. I am currently a doctoral student working on British popular song during the Napoleonic Wars. The story of how I ended up working on this project is involved: its chief protagonists include my mother, who pushed me into a music degree during my indecisive youth, a marvelous music-history professor I encountered during my first degree, and a series of very nurturing supervisors, all of whom have had some interest in popular song or the music of Britain.
As a music historian, I cringe whenever a new acquaintance asks me why studying the history of music is a valuable use of my time. As a Christian, how do I answer?
Today I want to talk about a poem.
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
A guest post from David Parry.
The Christian Literary Studies Group gathered at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on Saturday 5th November for our annual day conference, which this year had the theme “Shaping Ends: Aspects of Apocalypse”. Current world events were not in view when we chose the theme months before, but they added a certain resonance to our discussions.
I’ve just come to the end of the second official week of my DPhil. In between all the library inductions, research workshops, and meeting new people, I’ve been doing some thinking about where I want my research to go: the kind of questions I want to ask, and work towards answering, about medieval recluses’ prayer.
A guest post from Richard Vytniorgu.
This post is the second of a short series summarising the three main talks given by Jonathan Chaplin and Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin at the Faith-in-Scholarship conference in February. (Summary of Jonathan’s first talk.)