Word: modern
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Great religious art requires a faith and a tradition. Once the art of Christendom had both. Last week the world, seldom in history so much in need of faith, looked to its artists at Christmas time for inspiration adequate to its need, and found little or none. For modern artists are conspicuously unblessed by faith or tradition...
...Salvador Dali used a Christmas angel and Star of Bethlehem for a timely nylon ad-a painting hardly more offensive than the mawkish Madonnas and cute little representations of Jesus in most modern chromos, Sunday-school picture books and Christmas cards. Largely, they were hack work, to be judged in the same charitable spirit as cards featuring Santa Claus, Christmas trees and blazing hearths. Either as art or religion they did not pretend to much. As Sculptor Moore himself remarked, without a sigh: "The great tradition of religious art seems to have got lost completely in the present day." What...
Since Copernicus, scientists, in trying to explain away the miracle of Christmas, have only increased the mystery. So most modern painters-the expressionists who try to satisfy themselves with flaunting their own fragile tatters of personal experience, and the abstractionists who take refuge in a pseudo-scientific picture of life as a composition of light rays and whirling particles-necessarily hide their gifts at Christmas. The only truth that many of them recognize is in the atom, which gives off not radiance but radioactivity...
...scientists, the book describes "techniques and results." The very fact that such a book can be published without revealing any real secrets stresses a verbal warning by Dr. Rosebury: "Bacterial warfare can be developed by any nation, large or small, rich or poor, to which the resources of modern bacteriology are available." "Resources," in this case, can mean almost any sort of laboratory...
...Bernard ("Spils") Spilsbury, who became known as Britain's modern Sherlock Holmes, showed what a doctor can do when he uses his nerve and knowledge to catch criminals. For nearly four decades, connoisseurs of real-life British murders could be sure that the case was really top-drawer when it included the appearance on the witness stand of tall (6 ft. 2 in.) Sir Bernard and his quiet acknowledgment: "I am the senior pathologist of the Home Office...