Tag Archives: Theological Aesthetics

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A Devotion to Beauty

“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)

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The Catalyst: An Artistic Challenge to the Church

(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 →

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Contributing “Art”

“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, ed. Leland Ryken)

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United with Beauty

“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