Mar 9, 2015 | Uncategorized
Mary McCleary is Regent’s Professor of Art Emeritus at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she taught from 1975 to 2005. Born in Houston, Texas in 1951, she received her B.F.A., cum laude in printmaking/drawing at Texas Christian University and her M.F.A. in graphics from the University of Oklahoma. Since 1970 she has participated in over 250 one-person and group exhibits in museums and galleries in 24 states, Mexico, and Russia. These venues include the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., MOBIA in New York City, the Grey Gallery at NYU, the Boston Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. She is also a recipient of a Mid-America Arts Alliance/National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. Her work has been regularly reviewed or featured in the Houston Post, Houston Chronicle, Austin American Statesman, Dallas Morning News, and other Texas newspapers, as well as in national publications: Art in America, Art News, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Art Papers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Art Week, Artspace, Texas Homes, New American Paintings, and Contemporanea International Arts Magazine.McCleary’s work is in many public collections including those of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the El Paso Museum of Art, the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont.
Mar 7, 2015 | Uncategorized
I became a Christian when I was 18, well before I was to get married and had to think about having children. When I did, like many conservative protestants, I uncritically accepted birth control and the family planning mentality; I saw having children as something of a choice for Christians, not unlike my secular neighbors. A few times over the years this mindset was challenged, but certainly not from within the evangelical community. Our seriously orthodox Catholic brothers and sisters would point out that life is a gift from God, and that God’s gifts must not be lightly rejected. Yet evangelicals continue to have their 2.2 kids like most Americans, and never question whether their embrace of the modern cultural norm is at all biblical.
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Mar 4, 2015 | Uncategorized
[Naturalism] must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond. And naturalism’s claim that, by confining itself to purely material explanations for all things, it adheres to the only sure path of verifiable knowledge is nothing but a feat of sublimely circular thinking; physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything.
–David Bentley Hart, The Experience of god: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
Mar 2, 2015 | Uncategorized
When we look at American exceptionalism through the lens of dissociation, that exceptionalism is transformed into garden-variety white supremacy. Dissociation sees this exceptionalism as proof of America’s evil character. It ignores two or three millennia of profound cultural evolution in the West, and it attributes the exceptionalism that results from that evolution to little more than a will to dominate, oppress, and exploit people of color. So in this new and facile liberalism, American exceptionalism and white supremacy become nearly interchangeable. Shift one’s angle of vision ever so slightly to the left, and there is white supremacy; ever so slightly to the right, and there is American exceptionalism.
When you win the culture, you win the extraordinary power to say what things mean — you get to declare the angle of vision that assigns the “correct” meaning.
–Shelby Steele, “Conservatism as Counterculture”
Mar 1, 2015 | Uncategorized
This question, most unfortunately, is the title of a piece in the online publication Vox, which is mainstream liberal in its coverage. Knowing that, which I did, it would have been easy to write off such a sentiment as biased. But deep down we all know “Christian” movies are not very good. If you want to know why, reading this article is a great start. But to really understand the dynamic of mediocrity in Christian movies and other cultural pursuits, you have to go back to the development of the Christian subculture in the 20th Century. (more…)
Mary McCleary is Regent’s Professor of Art Emeritus at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she taught from 1975 to 2005. Born in Houston, Texas in 1951, she received her B.F.A., cum laude in printmaking/drawing at Texas Christian University and her M.F.A. in graphics from the University of Oklahoma. Since 1970 she has participated in over 250 one-person and group exhibits in museums and galleries in 24 states, Mexico, and Russia. These venues include the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., MOBIA in New York City, the Grey Gallery at NYU, the Boston Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. She is also a recipient of a Mid-America Arts Alliance/National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. Her work has been regularly reviewed or featured in the Houston Post, Houston Chronicle, Austin American Statesman, Dallas Morning News, and other Texas newspapers, as well as in national publications: Art in America, Art News, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Art Papers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Art Week, Artspace, Texas Homes, New American Paintings, and Contemporanea International Arts Magazine.McCleary’s work is in many public collections including those of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the El Paso Museum of Art, the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont.
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