Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

Seattle University’s highly acclaimed chapel, has garnered the American Institute of Architects’ 2012 Gold Medal for architect Steven Holl. The medal is one of the most prestigious awards given to architects, with its previous recipients including Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, Ieoh Ming Pei and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Built in 1997, the Chapel of St. Ignatius was immediately welcomed as Seattle University’s spiritual heart and has come to be a popular destination for visitors interested in joining the campus community in worship or simply marveling at its beauty.

Jesuit Father Jerry Cobb, currently provincial assistant for formation and the provincial assistant for higher education for the Oregon Province, chaired the planning committee that hired Holl and supervised the design and construction of the chapel. As the chapel celebrated its 10-year anniversary in 2007, Father Cobb shared his thoughts with Broadway & Madison, the printed faculty and staff newsletter that preceded the University’s current publication, The Commons. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Broadway & Madison:  What’s something the average faculty or staff member might not know about the chapel?

Father Cobb:  Non-Catholics might be consoled to know that in 1995 we asked Steven Holl to design a chapel that would be “engaging for people of all faiths or no faith or faith-under-crisis.” The poet Rilke once advised that when people disappoint you, you should turn to nature because nature will not disappoint you, and I feel something similar about the Catholic Church. When it disappoints you, which is likely to be every day, you can turn to places such as the chapel where God’s saving presence seems tangible and life-giving.

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Jesuit Father Bob Fabing, an internationally known liturgical music composer and author, has written a Mass setting for Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, known by many as Mother Teresa. The setting, complies with changes to the Roman Missal, and is now available exclusively online.

“The inspiration for this Mass came from my 70 meetings with Mother Teresa and my many, many, many meetings with her Sisters. I wanted a melody that all of those who Mother Teresa reached out to—the poor: physically, emotionally, and spiritually—could relate to and which would bring them all to Christ at his Eucharistic Liturgy,” said Fr. Fabing. “I wanted a melody that all of those who Mother Teresa reached out to—the poor: physically, emotionally, and spiritually—could relate to and which would bring them all to Christ at his Eucharistic Liturgy.”

Father Fabing is the founder of the Jesuit Institute for Family Life Network, which includes 44 marriage counseling and family therapy centers in California and Oregon. He is the director of the 36-Day Program in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius at the Jesuit Retreat House in Los Altos, California, where he lives. The deep spirituality of his music is the fruit of his many years directing these counseling and spirituality centers.

He has also ministered in China for many years, teaching, promoting liturgical music and spreading the Good News of the Gospel.

For more information about the Mass of Teresa of Calcutta, please visit the Oregon Catholic Press website.

Jesuit Father Henry Garnet was tried and hanged in 1606 for his knowledge of the previous year’s Gunpowder Plot, in which Robert Catesby and other influential English Catholics nearly blew up Parliament and King James I of England. Witnesses said spectators pulled the priest’s legs as he writhed in the air to give him a speedy death and spare him more prolonged attention from the executioner.

In Jesuit Father Bill Cain’s play “Equivocation,” the man pulling on Garnet’s legs is William Shakespeare, the playwright for the theatrical company The King’s Men. He is commissioned by Robert Cecil, a power-player behind King James I, to write a play declaring the government version of the events of the plot. The King himself wrote the first draft.

“We don’t do politics,” Shakespeare says. “We do histories. True histories of the past.”

The play revolves around the cost of a government lie and how politics can become personal. Presented in modern language and dress, Equivocation presents a dilemma: tell the truth and lose your head or write propaganda and lose your soul? This political thriller reveals the complexities of the truth, the perils of compromise, and the terrible consequences of equivocation.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production of Equivocation will be playing at the Arena Stage in Washington DC starting on November 18, 2011. For tickets, visit the Arena Stage’s box office online.

The ad shown above was selected last week as one of the best Apple ads by an editor at Huffington Post. A longtime photojournalism professor at Creighton University, Jesuit Father Don Doll, appeared in the it (along with rocker Todd Rundgren) — dropped an e-mail about the experience to Catholic News Service. In an email titled “A bit of Creighton in Apple history,” Father Doll told the story:

“Here’s how I was invited to be in the Apple campaign ‘What’s on your PowerBook?’ Creighton graduate, Christian Wolfe, who had excelled in my publication design course, was an Los Angeles BBDO account executive with the Apple account who called asking if I had a black clerical suit, and if I would consider being in an Apple ad campaign. I called my Jesuit superiors in Milwaukee to see if there were any issues with my appearance in an ad. They didn’t have any.

“Apple flew me out first class, put me in in a San Francisco boutique hotel. We went out to the little, formerly Catholic church now a nondenominational wedding chapel, in Tiburon, across the bay from San Francisco, where I met Todd Rundgren (whom I had never heard of before!), and Michael O’Brien, the photographer, whom I did meet years earlier as an award winning National Press Photographer.

“Michael O’Brien exposed 76 rolls of 120 film over 2-3 hours. The ad was run in black and white and color in numerous national magazines. I received numerous calls from former students who saw the ad.”

And, Father Doll, an award-winning photographer himself, noted that he was ”pleased with the ad as it showed a priest in a good light.”

For those who are curious, some of the things listed on Fr. Doll’s PowerBook included: wedding homilies, grant proposal for a book, scans of pictures taken in Ireland, and “design for my Christmas card.”

[H/t: The Deacon's Bench]

For the 300th birth anniversary of Jesuit Rudjer Boskovic, the Croatian and Vatican Post jointly published a postage stamp with his figure on it.

In 1742,  Boskovic was consulted, with other men of science, by Pope Benedict XIV, as to the best means of securing the stability of the dome of St. Peter’s in which a crack had been discovered. His suggestion of placing five concentric iron bands was adopted.

The dome, for which his lasting solution saved Michelangelo’s work from destruction, is featured in the stamp’s background.

The presentation was hosted on September 13th by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration of the Republic of Croatia, who in addition to the stamp, decided to mark the third centenary of Boskovic‟s birth also by publishing the book “Rudjer Boskovic in the Diplomatic Service of the Dubrovnik Republic” in two bilingual editions: Croatian – French and Croatian – English