Monday, April 28, 2003 :::
 
A Future Broadway Star to Watch...SARS And Its Impact...Another Example of How Some Americans Missed the One of Stories of the Century.

Remember This Name. Yesterday brought one of the bittersweet joys of teaching college, which is what A Mind That Suits does when not blogging. A good teacher finds no greater joy than watching what are indisputably boys and girls when they enter college prepare to enter the real world as--most of them, anyway--what are indisputably young men and women. And yesterday, A Mind That Suits watched one of his favorite ever students, Amanda Spears, give her senior recital before graduating from the Catholic University of America with a degree in musical theatre. Strictly speaking, Ms. Spears was never a student of A Mind That Suits, but he did at one point lead a remarkable ensemble on Sunday mornings at a local church, and Ms. Spears was a big part of what made that ensemble remarkable. If A Mind That Suits wanted people to be very meditative, he simply asked Ms. Spears to stand at the back of the sanctuary and sing a capella. A boffo effect, as Variety would put it. Yesterday's recital showed just how rounded a performer Ms. Spears has become, deftly handling comedy and drama, and a whole range of musical styles with her soaringly beautiful voice. (A Mind That Suits also found out why it was so easy to communicate with Ms. Spears, as she chose some obscurities--famous in their day--that happened to be among his childhood favorites, most notably Carol Channing's Cecilia Sisson routine, and a passage from Dorothy Parker. Ms. Spears favorite hymn, it turns out, is one of the top two or three in the estimation of A Mind That Suits.) The world of musical theatre is a brutally Darwinian world, but it is a booming industry, and Ms. Spears enters it with all the skills to survive, and, it is easy to see, even triumph. Amanda Spears--remember the name.

All of which joy does nothing to lessen the sadness that A Mind That Suits feels in realizing that Ms. Spears is indeed quite the young lady, and so, in the natural order of things, about to pass from his world for good. Farewell, and God speed.

SARS and Your Pocketbook. In all the columns and columns of newsprint that has been spiled trying to figure out what will happen to economy as the ethics of the 1990's and some seriously misguided public spending (notably the government-caused telecom bubble), one note has been persistent. Some months ago, the Wall Street Journal made it explicit in an article dedicated to just one question: what effect will the Chinese economy have? The problem--and it's not so much of a problem--has been that it has been growing so fast, and so much of the activity is unreported, that there is a huge blank space in economic calculations. As the Washington Post and the Journal detail today, China is compensating for their shameful inactino on SARS by closing down most public meeting places. Suddenly, the great engine of Chinese economic growth may become a deadweight on the world economy, as many are beginning to point out.

It May Help To Remmber Peter Berger's Question About Economics We all know, said the famous sociologist, that chemistry grew out of alchemy, and astronomy grew out of astrology. What will grow out of economics?

The Chinese Are Not Only Controlling SARS The Journal, to its shame, did not report on it. The Post did, but did not comment on it. The Chinese have shut down churches as part of their SARS-fighting efforts.

JPII, Misunderstood Once Again A Mind That Suits has a reporter friend, who is not Catholic but covers religion, and in this sad year, that has meant the Catholic Church more often than not. A Mind That Suits has asked him several times why it is that both conservative and liberal Catholics seem to conceive of John Paul II as secretly desiring to be an autocrat who restores the Church to its pre-Vatican II glory? Liberals hate him for his "agenda," conservatives are always disappointed that he doesn't just chop off a bunch of liberal heads and be done with it. There is no way to match the image with the reality, which has led A Mind That Suits, an avid fan of JPII's for all 25 of his years on the Chair of St. Peter, to believe that most of the older generation of Catholics has not been listening.

This general feeling is only confirmed by American reactions to his few comments on architecture. Several years ago, Jaoquin Navarro-Valls, the Pope's spectacularly competent press spokesman, told everyone that the Pope had had the opportunity to see a whole variety of Church architecture, and the one thing that bothered him was that many modern churches lacked a sense of mystery. There was--to use his exact words--no "space for the spiritual." Here, this was taken to mean that he wanted all churches to be Gothic. A conservative group of architects even formed to help parishes design new Gothic churches.

What no one seems to have noticed is that the churches whose construction JPII himself has supervised have all been notable for their thorough modernity. That starts with the famous "Ark Church" in Nowa Huta, a town the communists of Poland had planned to be churchless. The Poles themselves disagreed, and then-Archbishop Karol Wojtyla led Christmas vigils in an open field in the snow for years until the Communists relented. The exterior of that church has always left A Mind That Suits a little cold, but the interior (at least as portrayed in photographs) is deeply moving, and very modern. So too with a new church for the Roman suburbs planned during the Millenium.

And the "Papal style" for outdoor events, as it has evolved over 25 years, has been exactly a combination of elements from the Church's great heritage and from modern art.

In his new encyclical , JPII expands on his views as reported by Navarro-Valls. They are now a whopping 253 words long, in English. And the reaction has been the same. No less an authority than Avery Cardinal Dulles, in an interview with the Washington Post, said the section on architecture was "fairly vague," but "it will give support to people who want a Gothic-style church as opposed to having everyone sit around in a circle or something."

While his admiration for Cardinal Dulles is undimmed, and while he would certainly never suggest that His Eminence has been inattentive to His Holiness, A Mind That Suits would, however humbly, like to differ: the comments are not vague, and they do not favor an architectural style. "Space for the spiritual." That's what he favors, it's quite clear, and it's a lot.

Speaking of the Pope's new encylclical, a series of excerpts from it begins today over on The Fullness Of Him.

Have a great Monday...







::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 12:11 PM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.