Novae Ars Vitae (New Life Art)

01/19/2016

Is a Rodin revival underway? Let us hope so! Rodin, along with his secretary/student Rilke, captures the shimmering intimacy and unsettling grandeur of the tactile and incarnated form.

The reopening in Paris of the Musée Rodin—all its subtleties and surprises only sharpened and freshened by a three-year renovation—is one of a series of events occurring almost simultaneously in cities on two continents that, if taken together, offer new opportunities to explore Rodin’s power and in…

01/15/2016

"The shift to post-humanism has left the world beauty-poor and meaning-deprived. It’s not so much that we need more artists and bigger audiences, though that would be nice. It’s that we accidentally abandoned a worldview that showed how art can be used to cultivate the fullest inner life. We left behind an ethos that reminded people of the links between the beautiful, the true and the good — the way pleasure and love can lead to nobility."

Modern art has certain kinds of social value, but we have suffered the loss of an old understanding of how beauty transforms the soul.

11/20/2015

"There is a chasteness to viewing fine art, a word likely shocking to some contemporary artists."

My preschoolers in an art museum teach me a lesson about learning to enjoy without touching. My mouth waters. I stare...

11/18/2015

Our friends at The Human Impact, trying to make some beauty—and getting caught in a web of rules.

Well, Street Art wasn't quite what we expected it to be today. After over an hour of yarn bombing, a lady cop pulled up and told us we had to stop. "This is private property," she said. Now, don't mind us, but we were a small portion of her worries. There were, quite literally, at least twenty trash…

11/10/2015

10/13/2015

"I believe the response to this mural shows how willing people are to give something meaningful a chance if it is presented to them with power and beauty." - NAV Artist Van Hecht-Nielsen on his Pope Francis mural.

All of a sudden, this relatively unknown Catholic artist from Colorado was painting the most visible mural in the world.

08/28/2015

Who's that painting the Pope's nose? Why, that New Life Art Co-Founder, Van Hecht-Nielsen!

08/18/2015

Meet the Love in Bloom Project," a social initiative devised to spread a little beauty through Dallas."

On Wednesday, a stranger might come up and give you a bouquet of flowers — for free. Those blossoms are part of the Love In Bloom project, a social initiative ...

07/31/2015

Johann Sebastian Bach said that “The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” That is another way to say that the aim and final end of all music should be Beauty, for it has always been with beauty that we glorify God just as it has always been beauty that refreshes our souls...Bach’s is an unpopular notion in our secularist age. That the truth of it shines through all our willful and accidental corruptions and corrosions testifies to the fact that classical music is still indisputably and essentially about Beauty, even for those of us who do not believe in God. Beauty falls like the refreshing rain on all our souls alike

It may be that the greatest challenge facing those who love classical music in our modern age is the one facing those who do not also love Beauty. If classical music is not about Beauty, then what is it about?

06/26/2015

David goes out "undefended" to take on the powers of the world.

A new behind-the-scenes video from the filming of "CATHOLICISM: The Pivotal Players" (http://PivotalPlayers.com). Father Robert Barron has embarked on a new ...

06/25/2015

“A lot of people don’t care about us in here. They think everybody is the same, what they see on TV, which we’re not. We’re all human beings still.”

Some in this audience had only heard classical music in the movies, in elevators or at the grocery store. But six members of the Kansas City Symphony who played at Lansing State Penitentiary this week won new fans for classical music.