There is undoubtedly an element of drag in contemporary women wearing quasi-clerical garb—drag charged with coquettish sacrilege. These women are…
Time, gender-bending, and the medieval church
Catholicism
Sexy celibates and unmanly men?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heavenly Bodies features stunning haute couture and trendy prêt-à-porter garments staged with objects from medieval…
The American romance of the not-so-little black dress
The focus on nuns in Heavenly Bodies highlights the historical oddness—really, the queerness—of nuns in the American imagination. It is…
The cardinal’s new clothes?
Perhaps predictably, then, given the show’s nature, Heavenly Bodies thus focuses on Catholicism’s pomp, rather than its poverty. Both the…
On the advantage and disadvantage of history for life
The more closely one examines the Vatican loan, laid out with minimal commentary in the catalog’s first volume (separated from…
The soulful, comic defiance of Heavenly Bodies
Heavenly Bodies surprised me because I was anticipating a celebration of Catholic aesthetics and fashion. It was partly this. But…
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, something dead
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, which opened this past spring and will…
Shakespeare’s theatre of conversion
My claim in this essay is that William Shakespeare’s theatre grew out of the early modern crisis of conversion—the period…
Pope Francis and intellectual humility
[Pope] Francis repeatedly emphasizes that ideas and realities must be in continuous dialogue. This is a refreshing and ever-timely affirmation…
Catholic Modern: An introduction
The Church, like no other institution of its size, is beholden to its past. That past is, however, often misunderstood.…