… A majority of Protestant voters, the largest religious group in the United States, align with Republicans. And there are signs of weakening Democratic support among other religious groups, including Hispanic Catholics.
(Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias)
I’ll whisper something to the wind, see where it goes. You never know. Chicanery rife, fury rampant, decency starved, rhetoric is what there is. I’ll go further, won’t I? See if I don’t. Maybe it’s all there is.
FROM WHOSE PULPIT?
whencesoever:
stricture of prophet
command of anointed
preaching of messiah
insight of mystic
tenet of saint
by whomsoever:
chosen called appointed
prophesied beseeched denied
howsoever:
prayed proclaimed indoctrinated
thundered brayed evangelized
wheresoever:
spoken writ engraved
chiseled steepled carved
chanted hymned piped
resolved:
that life created
in the likeness of
Mighty all this all that
be worthily taken
by nought but
what did give it
is ever and always
by sundry and each
honored devoutly
in brazen breach.
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
Glimpses and Manias (I’m So All About This Painting)
Lee Krasner’s grid-like “Composition” (1949), featuring hieroglyphic-like forms, will be featured in the exhibition “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” opening Oct. 4 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With its visual complexity it opened new avenues for explorations in abstraction. Credit… Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [New York Times caption and illustration]
This thumping doodle by Lee Krasner — whatever it is, I like it, not least because it looks like some kind of writing devised by a sensibility going for broke. For that matter it could be the shower tile of a Venusian. The “Jewish girl from Brooklyn’s” early influences are pegged as “Hebrew calligraphy, cubism, Mondrian and especially Matisse.”
Krasner’s artefact conveys well nigh infinite possibility as to what a painting can be or what could be a painting. Nothing adjacent to “pretty” or “ugly,” just intricacy tantamount to a perfervid tramontane hallucination. It makes her partner’s drips look lazy.
The tale of Krasner’s 1950s collages is one of those creation stories that love to tell themselves and be told. They acquire the status of deep lore surrounding deceased practitioners whose leavings accrete value trousered by museums and galleries.
At a dead end after struggling with some recalcitrant drawings, she ripped them in half and threw them on the floor. “Having finished this bout of destruction, I slammed the door and walked away,” she said. Days later, she saw the possibilities. She tore more, she pasted those scraps to paper — and later Masonite — and interlaced them with tangled, cursive, or thrusting marks.
Who hasn’t struggled with a “recalcitrant” drawing? The upshot in this case has the heat of annunciation: “Lo,” spake the angel, a connoisseur. “My jaw dropped. She was a really great painter.”
(Amei Wallach, “For Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Equal Footing at the Met,” New York Times, 2-25-26)
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved