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…
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.
Subservience to Progressive Little Notions
If beauty can save the world, maybe it can even save the art world.
“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…
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…
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…
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…
‘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…
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…
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…
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.
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…