Thursday, February 09, 2012

spaced out

The folks at the Very Unfriendly School of Theology moved to St Louis in 1981 and took up a floor or two in a large Jesuit building, exiled, so to speak, for about thirty years. They recently bought a closed down girls' academy and are refitting it for their own priory.


The original chapel


The first iconoclastic revamping for the school



The basic spatial revamping for the Friars
Note the raised platforms along the side
for the choir stalls


Temporary furnishings





View from the choir loft


With choir stalls





With crucifix

In use





3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you implying that iconoclasm can come from psychical weakness? sc that today's Catholics, in contrast to Pius 12's, lack the psychical strength to cathect with ?baroque sanctuaries?

Nietzsche ask'd whether Plato turn'd against the senses because of an over-rich sensory experience. Plato offer'd them asceticness as an exit from dangerously charged sensory experience in their selves?

But I suppose one may turn against the senses from sensory weakness, as perhaps induced by the short-term attention span inculcated by TV, the remote channel-flipping TV, watching TV while surfing the internet, texting while driving, listening to a lecture while playing a video game, etc? Muzak is no longer play'd. Easy-listening FM stations now play regular fast tempo pop music.

I'm not even Catholic and I find the thought of experiencing the original chapel rather overwhelming. The "revamped" chapel doesn't speak to me, but it doesn't promise to overwhelm my psyche via the senses if I had to sit within it for the duration of a liturgy.

The more than Aristophanic velocity of our psyches's sensory processing may not be entirely a detriment. My sense is that my parents simply couldn't follow the action, not to mention the signage, of a movie such as the Matrix. ...

And didn't Star Trek hint at the reality of super-fast voices that pre-Boomers such as Kirk, Spock, and Bones could hear only when the voices were recorded and re-play'd at slower velocities?

OreamnosAmericanus said...

Baroque? It's pretty spare by preVatII Catholic standards. And Gothic.

You'd make a lousy Orthodox. One Divine Liturgy and they'd have you in a straight jacket! :P)

Anonymous said...

I'd try to evade the Orthodox Danites in their liturgy's smoke.

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