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Exquisite thinking and writing here, Kevin.

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Thanks, Mike! It sounds like the piece gave you what I hoped it would.

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Nothing remotely beautiful to be found, communicated or even suggested in the grotesque image that you featured at the top of your page.

If you were wandering in the woods and came across a mutilated human body nailed to a tree or wooden cross you would be horrified.

But then again such events were quite popular and in effect sources of entertainment in the American South - strange fruit indeed!

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I have a feeling that Titian meant to suggest a certain glory—a certain beauty—in the light outlining Christ's head and overlaying His body. It's a gruesome painting to be sure, but that's because Christ's beauty is specifically in His suffering as God's son at the moment of crucifixion.

Finding a mutilated human body nailed to a cross in the woods would be horrifying, but because that body isn't Christ. His murder and then resurrection (hinted at, I think, by that same painted light from the image) are beautiful by our salvation found in them, where other murders are horrific to their victims and witnesses, not beautiful. And I'm not sure what the American South has to do with anything I've written above.

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