I have developed a certain tendency to use the phrases “changing the world” or “taking over the world” when speaking with creative friends. I usually leave this without any particular explanation, a seeming little absurdity thrown into a comment or conversation, but I actually mean what I say. I fully intend a lifelong conspiracy with these friends. You see, these friends understand and create beauty, and beauty changes the world. Continue reading
I’m beginning to think that if I don’t have an identity crisis at least once a month, I’m simply not taking in enough good art. A few weeks ago, I watched a piece of theater that has become a bit of a local staple here in Louisville: Actors Theatre’s production of Dracula. It is really one of the very few pieces of theater I have seen in recent years, but with the performance came a flood of emotions, the degree of which I wasn’t quite expecting. It threw me into a serious identity crisis that, if I were to be quite honest, I’m not entirely over. In fact, I intend not to be. Continue reading
“We so often talk of ‘worldview thinking’ and ‘applying the Bible to every area of life,’ but that is all too often just a skeleton of a theory. The medievals actually lived it; imperfectly, yes, but still much better than anything in modernity. We have no sense of a life carefully crafted by beauty. A devotion to beauty will sculpt everything we do, and the medievals knew that very well. Beauty trains one’s mind to think differently about family, leisure, labor, theology, and the future. Yet we thin-souled moderns are so proud of our rejection of poems and stories and paintings. We lead half-lives and die with less. God has given us so much more, and we slight Him in our meager living. Christendom has lost so much.”
– Douglas Jones, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth
(Illustration: anonymous medieval artist, Monk Tasting Wine from a Barrel)
“It is this attraction to loveliness that lies at the heart of nurturing soul. God has made us to be drawn to the beautiful. So often the divide between children who have full souls and those who don’t lies here with the pursuit of beauty. The serious pursuit of beauty, for both children and adults, has a delightfully amplifying effect on all other areas of life. It makes us better at everything else… The connection here is quite mysterious, but it’s often quite radical. Poetry, music, and fiction can utterly transform the coldest logician, computer programmer, or colonel into someone with soul.”– Douglas Jones, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth
(Illustration: Rembrandt van Rijn, Woman Carrying a Child Downstairs)
“For a Christian rhetoric, perspicuity is the foundation of all the canons of style. Clarity of thought must always be the preacher’s aim. Clarity is the basic beauty of eloquent oratory and the driving power that persuades one’s listeners. The beauty of teaching is making clear the truth, for it is in the truth itself, rather than in the words about truth, in which beauty is found. The truth itself, Augustine tells us, when presented in simplicity, gives pleasure because it is the truth. This is one of Augustine’s best insights. Here, a thousand years before the Protestant Reformation, one easily detects the guiding principle of Protestant plain style. Here is the foundation of the Protestant understanding of beauty.”
– Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, Volume 2
HT: Douglas Wilson
(This posts was originally written for my personal blog, The Sojourner’s Journal, in November, 2008. It served as one of my first expressions of my discontent with the church’s modern relationship with art and the desire to engage that relationship and motivate greater art from the Christian community. Thus, it is the forerunner of this site and, as this site prepares for a soon-to-come redevelopment in its existence, I thought it would be fitting to post a personal moment of catalyst from which it was eventually formed.)
An Artistic Challenge to the Church (or, Why Does Christian Art Usually Suck?) [part 1 of many]
The modern day Evangelical Church has largely (almost completely) failed in creative endeavors such as visual art (drawing, painting, etc.), music, literature, and film. Failed might be an understatement. The church has produced very little that exceeds above a pile refuse (in the Pauline sense of that word) in any of these categories, and this is most troubling indeed. Continue reading
“This word–this idea of Art as creation is, I believe, the one important contribution that Christianity has made to aesthetics. Unfortunately, we are apt to use the words “creation” and “creativeness” very vaguely and loosely, because we do not relate them properly to our theology. But it is significant that the Greeks had not this word in their aesthetic at all. They looked on a work of art as a kind of techné, a manufacture. Neither, for that matter, was the word in their theology–they did not look on history as the continual act of God fulfilling itself in creation.”
– Dorothy Sayers, “Towards a Christian Aesthetic” (source: The Christian Imagination
“What more, you may ask, do we want? … We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
– C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
I’ve been doing a decent bit of reading since the Spring semester ended. Particularly invigorating have been some writings on the subject of beauty. N.T. Wright, whatever the controversy regarding his views of justification notwithstanding, has a remarkably wonderful chapter on beauty in his much-celebrated volume Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense
“the reason we have these dreams, the reason we have a sense of a memory of the echo of a voice, is that there is someone speaking to us, whispering in our inner ear–someone who cares very much about this present world and our present selves, and who has made us and the world for a purpose which will indeed involve justice, things being put to rights, ourselves being put to rights, the world being rescued at last.” Continue reading
Godawa, Brian. Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story & Imagination
There seems to be a recent movement within the Protestant community to finally start talking about the arts and their role in the Christian life. Numerous publishers in the evangelical and mainline streams have released direct or indirect approaches to the matter as of late, from groundbreaking (William Dyrness’ much needed primer Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue
