Devotion by Design

[midnightmelody]

Tonight I went to see Devotion by Design, an exhibition of Italian altarpieces at the National Gallery. They've tried to reduce the sense of being in an art gallery by using dimmer lighting, and creating in one room a high altar complete with cross, candles, and Gregorian chant. The illusion was sufficiently good that I was disappointed by the

Comments

[quizcustodet]

Haven't been to the exhibition - sounds cool!

I'm not so sure that we should be sad over the stripping of the altars. While it no doubt did deprive churches of some masterpieces of religious art, based on visits to other European countries which didn't experience such a stripping, it also spared us from some hideously over-done and gaudy churches where the cacophony of silk, gold and marble drowns out any beauty the church itself had to offer.

[midnightmelody]

Good point! It's always nice to have a historical question where the counterfactual has actually played out. I'll still be sad, because I dislike Henry VIII and don't want him messing with my church, but that's not on aesthetic grounds. :)

[midnightmelody]

had Tolkien donated all the money he (and his estate) made from Lord of the Rings to cost effective causes, and/or used the influence he gained from being famous to persuade others to do likewise, he could have had a vastly bigger positive impact on other peoples' lives than he could have done as a medical doctorThanks, I think this is a good point about my own misconceptions about what is rationally the most important. I'm slightly confused though - don't SCI and other such charities require people (including potentially some doctors, at least for some initial thinking) to actually carry out their work as well as fund it? And how much of our financial importance is due to ridiculous economic inequities which we might also want to be fighting? (Yep, I really need to get to a GWWC chapter meeting so that I can think about these things more thoroughly, though I should note that I'm already persuaded of the 10% tithe

[midnightmelody]

for most people the most ethical career choice is to earn and donate, so it's unusual for anyone to take that path . . . Maybe one day there will be a shortage of doctors, because everyone is clamouring to be a hedge fund manager in order to donate more to charity, but we are so very, very far from that point that it is almost always better to earn the most you can.

That does assume that the activities undertaken in order to get money are morally neutral or good (or at the least, cause less moral badness than the good done by the extra money you can donate). My admittedly-vague perception is that there's at least some disagreement about whether things like managing hedge-funds (or even can be) practiced ethically.

For example, writing an article about why cost effective giving is awesome is writing, and writing a cheque takes less than a minute (and leaves much brain free for thinking about Hobbits, in any case).I definitely agree. I'm still floundering around the edges of my real question, which is possibly more like: if