Acceso usuarios
Denise DuPont
This essay describes Impresiones provinciales, José Jiménez Lozano’s seventh ‘dietario’, as attentive to the everyday life of the human person and concerned with the lack of spiritual health in the contemporary world. Despite the bleak panorama, Jiménez Lozano suggests that hope and mercy are still possible thanks to a simple beauty linked to the liturgy and poetry of our daily lives. Once beauty breaks through the heartless shell we hide inside, we are free to express charity as compassion. While the humanitarian corpus of this author can be characterized as drawing on the Catholic church’s teachings on morality and human dignity, as a literary artist Jiménez Lozano is committed to the expression of beauty in a theologically-inflected but solidly interfaith context, as part of his restoration of the ideal of mercy. This article addresses his conviction that the artist must be countercultural; his lament for the beautiful and the notion of the human person as possessing a soul; his exposition of practical lessons from monasticism; his confidence in the value of reading and conversation; and his faith in beauty as the mechanism that cuts through our layers of isolation and allows us to relate to each other mercifully.
