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art 33

1.5 Speed to Nowhere

Over the decades, I suppose I learned a lot from podcasts; plenty of facts and all the “sides” to stories. Very little of those things seem to matter to me…
May 6, 2025

The Ghost Cricket Orchestra

If we are willing to listen, we might be able to learn what we are listening for. Not just a deeper connection to our humanity, or a meditative appreciation of…

Artificial Intelligence for the Artificially Intelligent

Perhaps AI isn’t referring to the technology itself, but only those who use it.
March 7, 2025

Subservience to Progressive Little Notions

If beauty can save the world, maybe it can even save the art world.
February 25, 2025

“The Sensation of Seeing”: How T.S. Eliot Defamiliarizes the Christmas Story

That which we most value is often that which most frequently slips into dull repetition.

Against Ideological Art

Nevertheless, if someone of a conservative disposition wishes to produce excellent art that, in a certain sense, supports conservatism, the best thing they can do is to focus simply on…
September 11, 2024

Medieval Hillbilly Kings, Priests, Pagans, and Poets: Beowulf, Johnny Cash, and Trent Reznor

Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and…
September 2, 2024

Gadfly Graffiti

In a funk no more, I was prepared to meet the smile of my daughters with a genuine smile of my own as they came out of practice. The graffiti…

First Hack: A Techno Myth

Unaware, we can stand in a museum, in a temple of modernity that extracts life from all other temples. We can gaze into the vengeful gift of a god while…

Wisdom is Born of Wonder: A Review of Wonder Strikes

A good number of Christian scholars draw first and foremost on Thomas Aquinas for their accounts of beauty. Desmond, though he’s aware of and engages with the Thomistic tradition, has…
October 4, 2023

An Empty Room of One’s Own

There are things that a full room can do for us. It can reassure us. It can offer comfort. It can offer luxury and pleasant distractions. A full room can…
September 21, 2023

‘Art Will Touch Lives’: An Aging Farmer Adds a New Dimension to his Ministry

Ralph's art might never grace the walls of collectors or galleries or museums in his lifetime, but he knows from experience art’s potential to draw crowds that can encounter the…

Reading with Christian Eyes

Christians, then, have the proper perspective from which to read literature. We can see the profound truths of literature, be they ancient or modern, “pagan” or Christian. Furthermore, we can…

The Irony of a Wendell Berry NFT

While some are admittedly pleasing, NFTs will not be the great decentralizing force many of us long for. Instead, their rapid profusion creates speculative bubbles and too often rewards unvirtuous…
February 11, 2022

Celebrity, Success, and the Kingdom of Heaven

Atlanta, GA. It’s been a rough few years for celebrity evangelicals. In the summer of 2019, Joshua Harris—the Calvinist pastor who became a national sensation in the late ‘90s with…

What is Beauty? A Review of The Father of Lights

The idea that “no arguments or reasons have to be given to enable the experience of beauty” is dearly hopeful in a time when arguments and reasons are largely impotent…
November 17, 2020

Embattled: The Story of the O’Hanlon Fresco

Mill Valley, CA. As our country struggles to come to terms with its racist past—and present—a controversy surrounding a 1934 mural at the University of Kentucky mirrors the racial tensions…
October 9, 2020

An Artistic Ecosystem: A Review of Makoto Fujimura’s Culture Care

If truth, beauty, and goodness are truly and mystically related, beauty really is dangerous—but only to evil. Reading Culture Care, and contemplating Makoto Fujimura’s art, I can believe it.

What Makes Art Beautiful?

The failure to distinguish between art and beauty has caused much confusion. Art and beauty have two different but overlapping trajectories–one towards union and the other towards transcendent reality.

Picturing Home

Cultivate. Give order. Name. Attend. Reveal. Craft a parable. Homestead. Welcome. In Placemaking and the Arts: Cultivating the Christian Life (IVP Academic, 2018), Jennifer Allen Craft offers these paradigms and…

The Power of Place

Review of “The Power of Place: KU Alumni Artists” at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KS. The exhibit runs through June 30, 2019. There is a line in…

Fierce Velleity: Poetry as Antidote to Acedia

In “Lying,” the late Richard Wilbur diagnoses one of our age’s endemic ills with the paradoxical phrase “fierce velleity.” For those of us who don’t use “velleity” every day, the…

The One World On Offer

Perhaps the tension will be useful when it comes time to make something of what is. Just be sure you make it in a place called home.
Jason Peters
July 27, 2011

Poetry and the Common Language

This piece was originally posted at the University Bookman. Check out their site for other similar articles! --- If there is one principle which is nearly axiomatic among our contemporaries…