art 33

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…

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…

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

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

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…