Missy Rayder by Ahmed Klink for Vanity Fair Italy September 2019

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Missy Rayder by Ahmed Klink for Vanity Fair Italy September 2019

Model Missy Rayder is styled by Sarah Grittini in ‘A proposito di una donna’, lensed by New-York based, Lebanese photographer Ahmed Klink for Vanity Fair Italia September 2019./ Hair by William Scott Blair; makeup by Samantha Lau

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Witch-Burning Steilneset Memorial by Peter Zumthor & Louise Bourgeois

Images by Andrew Meredith

Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and the late French-born artist Louise Bourgeoise collaborated in the hauntingly beautiful and poetic Steilneset Memorial in Vardø, Norway, an arresting memorial to 91 people, 77 women and 14 men, who were burned at the stake here in the 17th century for the crime of witchcraft.

Sturla J. Stalsett, general secretary of the Vardø Church City Mission, pointed out during the opening ceremonies presided over by Her Majesty Queen Sonja of Norway, that the memorial is meant to remind us of the ongoing danger of collectively creating scapegoats. If historical circumstances seem peculiar now, the intent behind the work addresses larger moral claims.

I highlight descriptions of the memorial, drafted for Architectural Record:

Visitors enter the memorial on the north by a gangplank placed perpendicularly to the elevated Zumthor structure, a 410-foot-long building within which a tensile structure of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)-coated fiberglass fabric is suspended on cables. Once inside, the visitors proceed along a 328-foot wood-plank catwalk about 5 feet wide. As they thread their way through the dark cocoon of the interior, visitors pass 91 windows, each dimly lit by an exposed-filament bulb. Ropelike cords from the lamps form scalloped borders at the edges of the undulating ceiling. The feeling is like being in the stomach of some prehistoric creature, half-fish, half-reptile — except there is a glimmer of light.

Owing to the high winds on the site, the glass walls stop short of the ceiling and floor and slide past each other to allow gaps for wind drafts. In the middle of the space is Bourgeois’s piece, an aluminum chair with gas flames shooting out of the seat. In this rather literal evocation, the burning chair is reflected in seven oval mirrors placed on metal columns in a ring around the fiery seat, like judges circling the condemned. If you think you’ll be too warm standing near the burning chair, don’t worry. In this blustery place, temperatures rarely rise above 51 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Will Fashion Help Challenge America's Catholic Bishops?

This editorial ‘Pagan Something’ on Flamboyant Magazine is a discovery via Vogue Italia’s Talents focus on photographer Marco D’Amico and stylist Italo Pantano.

Pantano styled ‘Pagan Something’ for Flamboyant, lensed by photographer Emanuele Savoia. The editorial begins with a quote by Theda Kenyon, author of ‘Witches Still Live’: The blackest chapter in the history of Witchcraft lies not in the malevolence of Witches but in the deliberate, gloating cruelty of their prosecutors.

You might think that the entire subject of Witchcraft is long behind us, but this is not so. As theologians use archaeology, cultural anthropology and a host of new discoveries about early Christians to examine the critical question ‘Is God male?’,  theologians like Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, a Fordham University professor, are under attack.

American bishops have issued a 21-page critique governing the future of theological study in the United States, writes the NYTimes.

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