Art & Theology

Roundup: Mary Magdalene exhibition, “Grief Songs,” seeing God in Japan, and more

September 23, 2026September 24, 2026 Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

EXHIBITION: Mary Magdalene. Sin. Pray. Love., September 17, 2026–January 17, 2027, Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany: The first comprehensive art exhibition in the German-speaking world dedicated to Mary Magdalene, presented by the Städel Museum in collaboration with the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, opened this month. It was heavily advertised throughout Frankfurt when I was there in August, and I regret that the timing of my visit didn’t coincide!

Gonzalez, Nieves_La sfida — Nieves González (Spanish, 1996–), *La sfida* (The Challenge), 2025. Oil on canvas, 116 × 81 cm. Private collection.

The poster image, The Challenge, one of over a hundred works on display, is an oil painting by Nieves González. It portrays Mary with her characteristic long, auburn-blond hair, dressed in an oversize red puffer jacket and holding a red skull.

Mary Magdalene is traditionally shown in red, a color representing her intense spiritual passion but also alluding to the legend of the first Easter egg. One version of the story goes that when Mary went to Rome to proclaim the Resurrection to Emperor Tiberius, a basket of hardboiled eggs in hand (she had brought them with her to Jesus’s tomb for sustenance), Tiberius scoffed and said that Jesus no more rose from the dead than those eggs she carried were red. Well, right then, the eggs changed color from their natural white.

I love the unexpected clothing choice in this painting. I bristle against a historical image type of Mary Magdalene, especially popular among sixteenth-century Italian aristocrats, that shows her only partially clothed, her breasts exposed, ostensibly to emphasize her stripping away of worldly vanity, and even her return to the innocence of Eden—but methinks the Renaissance and Baroque penchant for sensuality had more to do with this representation than did any kind of biblical or theological reasoning. González’s Mary does not bare her body for the titillation of viewers.

Nor is her gaze passive; it’s strong, assured, unashamed. “The challenge” of the title could be Mary’s defying her mischaracterization throughout history as a reformed prostitute—probably the number one thing your average person, whether Christian or non, most associates with her, but which comes from erroneously conflating her with other New Testament women. What the Bible tells us about Mary is that Christ delivered her from seven demons, after which she joined his movement, traveling with him and the other disciples and financially supporting his ministry, which suggests she was a woman of independent means; faithful in her devotion to Christ, she was present at his crucifixion and, two days later, was the first person to whom he appeared in his risen flesh, commissioning her to go and tell the others the news. Although church tradition presents her as the model penitent (which the skull symbolizes), we really don’t know what her former life looked like, nor her life after the events of the Gospels; only that Christ wrought a spiritual transformation in her, and that she boldly followed him. Her pose in The Challenge is one not of arrogance or smugness but of confidence, confidence in who she is, and in the Gardener who called her name.

Another challenge in Mary’s gaze could be for us to consider, if Christ chose her to be the first witness of his resurrection (an event of immense theological import) and ordained her to preach the same, why so many pockets of the church continue to restrict the ministry of women.

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ONLINE COURSE: Stories about the End with Dr. Mary McCampbell, October 13–December 8, 2026: Starting next month, my professor friend Mary McCampbell [previously] is teaching an online course on Tuesday evenings that will examine contemporary works of dystopian literature, film, and television. The reading/watching list includes novels by Don DeLillo, Douglas Coupland, Octavia Butler (in graphic novel adaptation), and Margaret Atwood; Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men; and a to-be-voted-on television series.

“Why is our culture so drawn to fantasies of death and destruction that often provide no ultimate redemption or regeneration? To begin exploring this question, we will analyze how dystopian narratives are (typically) the result of the modern and postmodern secularization of the concept of ‘apocalyptic.’ We will then examine contemporary works of literature, film, and television to investigate how these stories are told and what they reveal about the contemporary cultural landscape. Through close reading of cultural products, we will look at the relationship between dystopian narratives and the centrality of Western consumerism, the practice of religious belief, the experience of grief and loss, the threat of sinister environmental factors, and questions about the presence or absence of a human condition.”

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LIMITED SERIES: The Lord of the Flies (2026), dir. Marc Munden: Speaking of dystopian fiction, the recent BBC adaptation (bought by Netflix) of William Golding’s classic novel is phenomenal. The script, the acting, the cinematography, the score, the costuming—perfect. A dark story about thirty-some British schoolboys aged six to twelve who attempt self-governance when they find themselves stranded on a desert island, it explores democracy versus autocracy, vulnerability and violence, and the dangers of groupthink, probing the savage instincts humans tend to possess.

The book was written during the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. It deliberately subverts the colonial narrative found in many books of the period that touted the “civilizing” authority of the British.

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KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN: Grief Songs, an album by the Porter’s Gate: Last year, a group of roughly sixty scholars, pastors, and musicians gathered to share personal stories of loss and, out of that, wrote songs “meant to be sung by congregations who are willing to sit, to wait, to watch, and to pray with those who grieve.” The Porter’s Gate [previously] has selected a handful of these to record onto an album, and although most of the work has been done, they need some additional funds to bring the project across the finish line. “May these songs give voice to what has been wordless, and may they help our communities become places where the brokenhearted can bring their whole selves and still find themselves held.”

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FILM: Space and Time (2024), dir. Keone and Mari Madrid: Keone and Mari Madrid [previously] are a Filipino American husband-wife duo of hip-hop choreographers, dancers, and directors. In 2023, they suffered a series of losses, one of which they interrogate and transfigure in this forty-three-minute dance film, which shows the couple traversing the landscape of grief after a miscarriage.

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PODCAST EPISODE: “Seeing God in Japan” with Roger Lowther, The Purpose of Beauty, July 31, 2025: Podcast host Anna Gardner Herren interviews organist Roger Lowther [previously], an American missionary to Japan (for over twenty years) and founder of Community Arts Tokyo, about the role of beauty in missions. They discuss the popularity of Bach in Japan, and how Bach has opened up in many Japanese people a curiosity about and receptivity to Christian truth (he has stories about his language teacher attending one of his concerts and having an emotional connection to how it elucidated hope; and about his conductor for the St Matthew Passion asking him to explain the significance of the text being sung, since he was the only Christian in the room!). They talk especially about the necessity of beauty to combat despair after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

Lowther then goes on to recount stories from the ethnodoxology (“praise of the nations”) movement, which seeks to discerningly use indigenous art forms (musical, dramatic, visual, etc.) in Christian worship; he tells of the professional koto (traditional Japanese zither) player Chieko Ozawa (see this short film), who, when she became a Christian, initially thought she had to quit her instrument because of its association with Shintoism but soon realized it could be used for God’s glory.

(Read the transcript.)

James K. A. Smith on the challenge and joy of contemporary art

September 12, 2026September 17, 2026 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

The following two excerpts are from James K. A. Smith, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing (Yale University Press, 2026). Reproduced by permission of the publisher.

When I look back at my own path to a contemplative phenomenology, I am surprised to note that the places I learned to befriend mystery were rarely “religious” in the usual, institutional sense. Religious institutions seem as committed as Descartes was to certainty, clarity, and binary conceptions of knowledge. Instead, I have learned to love the inscrutable in spaces devoted to the imagination. I see now that the art gallery has been a “desert” of sorts into which I have retreated to find a stillness that makes me available for surprise. The cinema has been a cloister for contemplation. The novel has been a sanctuary into which I would retreat, only to discover the utter mystery of human beings on kaleidoscopic display. The wager of my book is that the modes of attention and contemplation that characterize “the aesthetic mindset” [Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, Your Brain on Art, xiii] are analogous to the spiritual itinerary of contemplation that we find in ancient desert dwellers, medieval mystics, and twentieth-century sages like Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, and Henri Nouwen. In our culture of distraction and self-absorption, as well as skepticism and doubt, one of the best paths for cultivating openness to mystic contemplation is to engage regularly with contemporary art in all its conceptual upending and difficult beauty.

Contemporary art invites an itinerary that tracks with monastic contemplation: we withdraw from the grind of the everyday to retreat to a space of reflection. Whether we are reading a poem or facing a painting, we have to still the chatter and noise to be present for the encounter. But one of the reasons I am specifically arguing for the contemplative significance of contemporary art is that the vanguard of the avant-garde is a terrain in which our expectations are upended. Unlike confrontations with “classics” (which, of course, have their depth and profundity), engagement with art and literature from our own generation means encountering art for which we don’t yet have established habits. And so I find myself drawn to the avant-garde and the experimental. By subjecting myself to such art, I forgo control and comfort. I can’t rely on existing habits of perception. Such art disrupts my predilections and demands that I make myself available for the aesthetic encounter in a new way. Sometimes this is maddening, even alienating. Sometimes it leaves me cold. But this, too, is an aspect of the mystical experience. To engage the experimental and avant-garde requires “a beginner’s mind.” “Isn’t a beginner’s mind,” Henri Nouwen asks [in The Genesee Diary], “a mind without the thought, ‘I have attained something,’ a mind opened for grace?”

Art holds together contradictions that discursive rationality disallows. The best artworks make room for the messiness of the world around us, the swirling complexity of the soul within, and even, sometimes, the infinite mystery of the divine. Where a syllogism has to resolve to a conclusion, a poem remains open. While a treatise has to make an argument, a sculpture can evoke fourteen feelings and seven ideas all at once, and all of them can be true. A movie like Terence Malick’s Thin Red Line doesn’t take sides; instead, it immerses us in a world that is a heart-rending conflation of good and evil, darkness and light, beauty and horror, and we recognize all of it.

Next to the antiseptic precision of binary logic, art is messy and maddening. Michael Kimmage, in a provocative essay “The Bad and the Beautiful,” describes this as “art’s salutary impurity.” This, he says, is a central endeavor of what we call modern art: it “defies expectations by rejecting the expected structures, pushing sense and language and image in bizarre, unpredictable directions, breaking up straight lines, flirting with ugliness, defying representation, leaving much unsaid, smudging borders, bubbling over into excess.” He takes James Joyce’s Ulysses as a prime example: “the mongrelness of the distinction,” he argues, “is not impurity for impurity’s sake. Joyce was striving to make discoveries about life by defying and discomposing the conventions of language, to take the lid off the consciousness of his characters, to peer into their souls.” It is the disruptive difficulty of the prose in Ulysses that is the means of epiphany, somehow displaying the abyssal mystery of human consciousness in a way that an fMRI never could. And I, curled up on my sofa in what looks like “private” absorption, am, in fact, in solidarity with the beautiful monstrosity called humanity that lies beyond the reach of “philosophy of mind.” By cultivating an “aesthetic mindset” and a contemplative posture, we learn new habits of attention and wonder that underwrite a life of compassion and peace. Contemplation of contemporary art could engender just the sort of rupture and disruption that can make us aware of our ek-static being, our longing for communion, and break us open to the possibility of grace—the arrival and incursion of something unanticipated.

pp. 50–53

In many ways, art has been an occasion for me to practice friendship with epistemic failure. Artworks have helped me learn how to feel at home in the dark. Held by a painting that baffles me, rapt by a poem that eludes me, dazzled by a film that defies my comprehension, I practice dwelling in epistemic darkness. I can find a certain thrill in perplexity. I start to find joy in unknowing. Moments of analytic failure in front of artworks become occasions for a new kind of patience. It’s not that I resolve to stay until the artwork reveals an answer; it’s rather that the aesthetic experience lures me into a strange kind of waiting that doesn’t expect resolution. I am still expectant, even hopeful. But I am learning that what is given will not be a disclosure that can be fed back into my syllogisms; instead, a different kind of truth dawns, on a register of awareness that exceeds binary logic. . . .

Part of the joy I experience with contemporary art is the peculiar elation that comes from being in a “beginner’s” space. It is the joy of perpetually learning something new; the joy of being an eternal novice. To live a life in the company of contemporary art is to be thrown into unfamiliar territory where all of my acquired imaginative prowess seems useless and irrelevant. Like I’m just learning how to see. I encounter such works and, as [John] Carvalho puts it [in Thinking with Images], I don’t know what to think. My inclination is to move on—turn the page, change the song, move to the next sculpture, looking for something familiar, comfortable. But when I look away from what arrives as opaque, I evade possibility. For to run away from the darkness of an aesthetic encounter—the inscrutability, even offense, of the work—is always to run backward, to comfort and familiarity. The challenge of the artwork arrives, then, as something of a threat to self-assurance and command. But what it invites is a breakdown that could be a breakthrough. To dwell with such artworks is to make one’s home in the dark. To wait with them—quietly gazing at the opaque painting, continuing to read the vexing story, staying in one’s seat despite the alienating film—is already an act that unsettle autarky. To trust that something might be happening that you don’t recognize, can’t control, and don’t understand. Who knows?”

pp. 142, 163–64

Roundup: “Presence and Mystery” conference in Philly, rabbi chants 9/11 voicemail messages, and more

September 6, 2026September 17, 2026 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: September 2026 (Art & Theology)

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CONFERENCE: Presence and Mystery: A Re:Echo Symposium on Art and Mystery, September 24–26, 2026, Resurrection Philadelphia: “Join philosopher James K. A. Smith, theologian Natalie Carnes, filmmaker Benjamin Stamper, and film historian Joe Kickasola for an inspiring exploration of the surprising relationship between art and mysticism; unknowing as spiritual and creative practice; and how the embrace of mystery restores us to the world—a re-enchantment vital to our formation and flourishing.”

The conference is organized by Re:Echo, “a group of professional artists and friends committed to a creative praxis informed by our daily and spiritual life together, and to the holistic flourishing of all artists, the church, Philadelphia, and the world in and through our creative work.” It is part of their 2026 project The Aesthetics of Shalom, a multidisciplinary, extended meditation on, as the Hebrew word indicates, “comprehensive flourishing, wholeness, and peace of and in God.”

The weekend will include lectures and discussions; the premiere of MOYA SEM’YA (MY FAMILY), a film by Benjamin Stamper; the inaugural Re:Echo Journal Literary Salon (following the release on September 9 of the journal’s first issue, available freely online or for purchase in print); the release concert for Each Mortal Thing, an album of original work by Brother Sister, a new project headed by Christopher and Jeremy McDonald; and guided tours through the rich and unique arts offerings of Philadelphia. The cost of the full conference package is $150, or $75 for a day pass.

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WORKSHOP: “Who Taught You What Jesus Looks Like? Power, Imagination, and the Face of Christ” by Victoria Omotoso, October 10, 2026, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London: “How are images of Jesus shaped by culture, history, and power? And how do these images, in turn, shape theology, identity, and discipleship? Drawing on biblical studies, Black theology, and film, Victoria Omotoso, author of Imag(in)ing Jesus in the Universal or Particular (Bloomsbury, 2025), will invite you, in this workshop, to critically reflect on the figure of Jesus and consider how faith is lived in contexts shaped by inequality and representation.” Tickets start at £7.50.

Imagining Jesus — Portrayals of Jesus in *The Lumo Project: The Gospel of Mark* (2014) and *Son of Man* (2006)

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CHANT: 9/11 memorial chant by Rabbi Irwin Kula: This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US [previously]. In the days and years following the attacks, several final voicemail messages from victims to their families were publicly released, sent from the World Trade Center towers and the hijacked airplanes. Rabbi Irwin Kula set some of these words to an ancient mournful Jewish chant traditionally used for the book of Lamentations. He chants them as a memorial. [HT: Nadia Bolz-Weber]

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NPR SEGMENT: “Melting guns and bullet casings, this artist turns weapons into bells” by Neda Ulaby: Artist Stephanie Mercedes (she/they) melts down bullet casings and parts of old guns and casts them into bells (associated with sacredness or mourning) or builds them into kinetic sculptures that make music, transforming weapons of hate into works of beauty. Reporter Neda Ulaby talked with Mercedes at her spring 2023 exhibition A Sky of Shattered Glass Reflected by the Shining Sun at Culture House in Washington, DC. [HT: Still Life]

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HYMNS arranged by Sam JC Lee:

Sam JC Lee [previously] is a jazz bassist, composer, and sound engineer, an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music, and the director of worship at Citylife Boston. Citylife was the church that formed me as a young adult: My husband and I attended during his grad school years from 2010 to 2015. And music was a big part of that formation. I fondly remember the occasional jazz worship services that Lee arranged music for and directed. Here are two of his hymn arrangements.

>> “Doxology”: Featuring vocalist Robbie Pate and keyboardist Jiri Nedoma. Lee has publicly posted the lead sheet in the keys of C, B♭, and A♭.

>> “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”: Featuring Esther Lee on vocals, Sam JC Lee on bass, Leo Maxey on trumpet, Christian Hizon on trombone, Myunghan Yoo on tenor sax, Sunny Eunsun Park on keys, and Byung Kang on drums.

Excerpt from The Circus of the Sun by Robert Lax (poem)

August 31, 2026August 31, 2026 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

Sonia Gechtoff_Celestial Red — Sonia Gechtoff (American, 1926–2018), *Celestial Red*, 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 77 3/4 × 78 in. (197.5 × 198.1 cm). Photo: Victoria Emily Jones, at 55 Walker (art gallery), Tribeca neighborhood, New York, August 2022.

In the beginning (in the beginning of time to say the least) there were the compasses. Whirling in void, their feet traced out beginnings and endings, beginning and end in a single line. Wisdom danced also in circles, for these were her kingdom. The sun spun, worlds whirled, the seasons came round, and all things went their rounds; but in the beginning, beginning and end were in one.

And in the beginning was love. Love made a sphere, and all things grew within it. The sphere then encompassed beginnings and endings, beginning and end. Love had a compass whose whirling dance traced out a sphere of love in the void; in the center thereof rose a fountain.

This untitled prose poem that opens the “morning” section of The Circus of the Sun by Robert Lax was originally published in The Circus of the Sun (Journeyman Press, 1959) and subsequently in 33 Poems (New Directions, 1988, 2019), Love Had a Compass: Journals and Poetry (Grove Press, 1996, 2019), and Circus Days and Nights (Overlook Press, 2000). Copyright © 1959 by the Estate of Robert Lax. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The Circus of the Sun is an effusive, metaphysical cycle of thirty-one poems by Robert Lax that presents the circus tent as a microcosm of the universe. The cycle unfolds over five sections—morning, afternoon, evening, the midway, and night—following the daily routine of a traveling circus troupe, from set-up to rehearsal to performance to tear-down.

The poem above is the second in the cycle (it’s preceded by an introductory tercet) and the first in the “morning” section. It describes the origins of the cosmos in the dance of the Trinity, drawing on Genesis 1 and the prologue to the Gospel of John, as well as the title “Alpha and Omega” that’s applied to both God the Father and God the Son in the book of Revelation. God is not so named, but there’s a measuring, loving Being behind the flurry of creativity that’s being narrated. There’s a sense of orchestration and design, with the beginning and the end traced out at once, held together in the mind of God, with all things in between.

Creation (Tiberius Psalter) — *The Creation*, from the Tiberius Psalter, New Minster, Winchester, 1050. British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius C VI, fol. 7v.

Many medieval depictions of the creation of the world show God holding a drafting compass, the tool of an architect, to mark out and circumscribe. Lax imagines the divine compass in balletic terms, its anchor leg fixed while its marking leg points and makes sweeping arcs, bringing about a fiery sun and spinning planets with wide orbits and seasonal cycles and so on.

Circles are symbols of eternity, wholeness, perfection. God is perfection, and God makes a perfect world.

And in the center of that world, this mystic poem suggests, is a fountain, representing the abundant life God is and gives. It’s cool and fresh and overflows. Jesus tells of this primordial fount to a Samaritan woman one day at Jacob’s well, describing it as a thirst-quenching “spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14).

The theological orientation of The Circus of the Sun is established in part by its epigraph, Proverbs 8:23–27a (Douay–Rheims translation), where Wisdom personified speaks:

I was set up from eternity,
And of old
Before the earth was made:

The depths were not as yet,
And I was already conceived;
Neither had the fountains of waters
As yet sprung out;

The mountains with their huge bulk
Had not as yet been established;
Before the hills
I was brought forth:

He had not yet made the earth,
Nor the rivers,
Nor the poles of the world:

When he prepared the heavens,
I was there.

Wisdom dances, Lax writes, in the beginning, producing fecundity.

The connection of creation to the circus in the Circus’s second poem is not clear, but it becomes more so as the cycle progresses, as the circular shapes and movements are echoed in rings, balls, and somersaults.

The Circus of the Sun was inspired largely by Lax’s experience traveling with the Cristianis, a long-standing circus-performing family of equestrians and acrobats from Italy. On a writing assignment for The New Yorker, he toured with the Cristiani troupe through western Canada in summer 1949, occasionally performing as a clown in their show.

Lax was fascinated by the Cristianis, especially by how they approached the state of “pure act” (actus purus)—a term that Thomas Aquinas, whose writings Lax engaged deeply, used to describe God, in the sense that God is pure existence and actuality with no unfulfilled potential. Michael N. McGregor, Lax’s biographer, elaborates in the 2015 article “Poetic Man of God”:

The acrobats’ performance, Lax thought, was as close as anything he’d seen to a fully present existence, an ability to be entirely in the moment that was both practiced and spontaneous. This ability, this nearness to the essence of God, came not only from physical ability and mental acuity but also a spiritual awareness, a fullness of love. The family was Catholic and close, trusting completely in the skill and the intention—the whole person—of each other.

The Circus of the Sun—Lax’s first full-length poetic work—didn’t come out until ten years after his illuminating immersion in circus life. It was published in 1959 by Journeyman Press, a small operation founded by the illustrator Emil Antonucci, using money from a Guggenheim grant, expressly to disseminate Lax’s poetry, beginning a lifelong collaboration between the two. Antonucci provided a few line drawings for the volume.

The cycle has appeared in three compilation volumes since then, including, along with Lax’s other circus poems, Circus Days and Nights (Overlook Press, 2000), which composer Philip Glass adapted into an opera in 2021.

The Circus of the Sun marks the end of the early, lyrical phase of Lax’s career. His later poems are much more experimental and minimalistic, alienating some readers (including me!).

But this work, which I think is his best, is brilliant in its grand exploration of, as Lax interprets in one of the poems, “creation and glory, / of rising, / and fall: / and again of the rising / where we are all risen.” For Lax, the circus is a place of glory, grace, daring, mindfulness, joy, play, and wonder that points back to creation, forward to the eschaton, and right here to what the life of faith looks like, nomadic and whimsical and death-defying.

In his introduction to Circus Days and Nights, Paul Spaeth writes,

Circus of the Sun is a blending of devotional poetry, in the Catholic tradition, with the eye of a journalist and the delight of a child. I use the term “journalist” in the sense of being a reporter but also in the sense of one who keeps a journal or diary. Lax, the reporter seeing things with childlike grace, at times relates his vision like an Old Testament prophet, at times like St. Francis composing a new “Canticle of the Sun,” and at times like a kid wandering through the circus grounds eating popcorn.

Hear Lax read the entire poem cycle in this 1983 recording from Patmos Island. (I’ve cued up the creation poem, but feel free to rewind to the beginning.)

Robert Lax (1915–2000) was an American avant-garde poet who is especially respected among practitioners and admirers of concrete poetry. Born to Jewish immigrant parents in Olean, New York, he attended Columbia University in the late 1930s, studying literature under Mark Van Doren. There he became lifelong friends with classmate Thomas Merton (Merton mentions him in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain), with whom he worked on the college humor magazine Jester and who influenced his conversion to Catholicism in 1943. At various times in his career, Lax worked as a university lecturer, book reviewer, film critic, Hollywood scriptwriter, editor at The New Yorker and the progressive Catholic magazine Jubilee, and even as a circus clown. In 1964 he moved to Greece, where he remained, with the exception of a few brief visits to the US and annual trips to the European mainland, for the rest of his life, writing.

Roundup: Site-specific dance in sanctuary, the Feast of Creation, botanical portraits of place, and more

August 26, 2026August 26, 2026 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

DANCE: “Seraphim” (2026), choreographed by Lindsey Hanson: This is one of the most unique dances for film that I’ve seen. It’s absolutely mesmerizing! Filmed in Dimnent Memorial Chapel in Holland, Michigan, with a bird’s eye view camera, “Seraphim” features eight female dancers who utilize the space’s pews and at times appear to be swimming in water or floating in zero gravity. They curl and climb and slide and propel. I love the illusion of them ascending and descending a ladder using the bench ends—a reference to the ladder in Jacob’s vision, linking heaven and earth. (Reminds me of the angels on the limestone facade of Bath Abbey in the UK!) In part because of the work’s title, I imagine the dancers as the invisible spiritual presences that move about the church, quietly ministering.

“Seraphim” is the second of four new works created this year as part of the Sanctuary Project, funded by the Creative Arts Collective for Christian Life and Faith. The third work, “Gethsemane,” will be performed for a live audience, who will watch from the stage, on September 5 at the W83 Ministry Center Sanctuary at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; free reservations are open! Debuting in 2021, SANCTUARY is a site-specific dance made for Redeemer, to activate the architecture of the church’s worship space, and choreographer and director Lindsey Hanson has expanded the concept into a continuing body of work.

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POEM: “Lord of Light and Dark” by Haley Hodges Schmid, Reformed Journal: Haley Hodges Schmid is a sonically driven poet, and that shows in this gorgeous poem published last month, a prayer with internal rhyme, consonance, a verbified noun, and other language play. It’s about “holy darkening,” says Schmid, whose debut poetry collection, Eros Rex, was released earlier this year by Orison Books. She seeks to recover positive imagery of darkness, and so expand our metaphorical associations. I’m reminded of other poets who have similarly explored the biblical paradox of the light and darkness of God, including John Milton (“Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,” he writes in Paradise Lost) and Meister Eckhart via Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows: “You are the One who is in-yet-beyond / the many, Light burning in darkness // and Darkness shining beyond light” (from Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart). There are a handful of contemporary hymns and worship songs that do the same.

“Lord of Light and Dark” was born out of a week-long residency on poetry and prayer that Schmid participated in in Asheville, North Carolina, led by Marie Howe, who had the group write collects, a short, structured prayer form used in Anglican worship.

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ARTICLES:

>> “A feast day for the whole church,” an interview with Kimberly Belcher, by Steve Thorngate, Christian Century: “This spring, the Consultation on Common Texts published an update to the Revised Common Lectionary: It added the Feast of Creation in Christ on September 1, offering biblical texts and other materials for use starting with the current church year. It’s a milestone in a decades-long ecumenical process.” Steve Thorngate talks with liturgical theologian Kimberly Belcher, who participated in the Assisi meetings in 2024–25, about this feast day that has only recently developed in the West but that has been celebrated in the East for more than five hundred years as the Feast of the Indiction. Belcher describes what’s behind the full name, how a feast day is distinct from a world day of prayer, the challenges and gifts of ecumenism, creation as revelation, and more.

Vooys, Mary Haasdyk_Feast of Creation in Christ — Illustration by Mary Haasdyk Vooys for *The Christian Century*‘s September 2026 cover story on the Feast of Creation in Christ, a new addition to the official liturgical calendars of many Western churches

I love the illustration Mary Haasdyk Vooys made for this article, which is used on the magazine’s cover. It shows Christ as Creator, holding a drafting compass and surrounded by diverse animals.

>> “Hillary Waters Fayle Creates ‘Portraits of Place’ from Seeds, Foliage, and Petals” by Kate Mothes, Colossal: Portraits of Place is an ongoing series of botanical artworks by Hillary Waters Fayle that pay tribute to the land and our relationship with it. The artist collects botanical material from a designated place, dries and preserves it, arranges it into an intricate, mandala-like pattern, and then uses that to create a cyanotype. Many of these she does on commission for people who want to commemorate a piece of land that is special to them.

“Penland Pop” by Hillary Waters Fayle — *Penland Pop* by Hillary Waters Fayle

I urge you to explore the artist’s website, which contains many more photos plus other extraordinary projects, including embroidered leaves and lacelike leafcuts: https://www.hillarywfayle.com/.

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WORSHIP RESOURCES: Creation Collection from Reformed Worship: ReformedWorship.org has compiled numerous resources on the theme of creation—worship services, songs, prayers, litanies, a Psalms-based reader’s theater, sermon series, stories, and more.

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SONG: “Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes” (The Heavens Declare the Glory of God) by Heinrich Schütz: This motet from 1648 is a setting of Psalm 19:1–6. It’s performed here by VOCES8 in the Christuskirche in Recklinghausen, Germany.

Reading and writing and ’rithmetic

August 18, 2026August 19, 2026 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

Many children, teens, and adults will be returning to school in the coming weeks to start their fall semester, cracking open the books and putting pens to paper (or fingers to the keyboard!), receiving the gift of learning to then hopefully steward.

On a visit to St. Martin’s Cathedral, aka the Domkerk, in Utrecht, Netherlands, in 2019, I was drawn to a bronze statuette of man who appeared to be immersed in study. Located in the Pandhof (cloister garden), an inner courtyard, it’s an early twentieth-century sculpture that portrays, I later found out, the medieval legal scholar and Utrecht cathedral canon Hugo Wstinc (d. 1349), best known as the author of the influential legal treatise Statuta ecclesiae Trajectensis (Statutes of the Church of Utrecht).

Bronze by Jan Hendrik Brom — Jan Hendrik Brom (Dutch, 1860–1915), *Hugo Wstinc*, 1913. Bronze, cast by Jan Eloy Brom. Pandhof van de Domkerk, St. Martin’s Cathedral, Utrecht, Netherlands. All photos by Victoria Emily Jones.

In the figure’s left hand is a penner, a stiff leather case for holding scribal tools like quill pens and penknives. In the Middle Ages, these were often strung together with an inkwell and slung over the belt.

The statuette of Wstinc was designed by Jan Hendrik Brom and executed by his son Jan Eloy Brom, and was installed atop the new central fountain in the Pandhof van de Domkerk in 1913. Spanning three generations from 1856 to 1961, the Utrecht-based Edelsmederij Brom (Brom Goldsmiths) was one of the most important Dutch workshops for ecclesiastical metalworking from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

View from the Utrecht Cathedral cloister

I appreciate how, by choosing to memorialize a clergyperson in the act of writing or note-taking, the cathedral honors the importance of gaining, synthesizing, and passing on knowledge.

As I, a philomath (lover of learning), embark on another year of self-study, I remember my reading, writing friend upon the plinth in that Dutch cathedral garden. His labors at the desk are holy. So are ours, if we consecrate them to God, no matter the subject or field.

Breton Pietà: A Woman Cradles Her Drowned Grandson

August 7, 2026 Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

All photos in this post are my own, taken in 2020 and 2024 (hence the different backgrounds).

Sarah Bernhardt was a popular French stage actress of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who performed internationally, primarily in dramatic roles.

Lesser known is that she was also an accomplished sculptor who exhibited at the Paris Salon and the Chicago World’s Fair, as well as in London, New York, and Philadelphia. She never went to art school, but she studied privately under Roland Mathieu Meusnier, and she had a studio in Montmartre.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, permanently displays Bernhardt’s most celebrated marble, Après la tempête (After the Storm), which shows a grieving grandmother cradling on her lap her dead grandson, who drowned in a fishing accident.

Bernhardt, Sarah_After the Storm — Sarah Bernhardt (French, 1844–1923), *Après la tempête* (After the Storm), ca. 1876. White marble, 29 1/2 × 24 × 23 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.

Full of pathos, the sculpture was inspired by a real-life tragedy Bernhardt witnessed while in Brittany. Seeing the older woman on the shore mourning, Bernhardt felt compelled to honor her story in stone—the love, the loss.

The composition deliberately evokes Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà, in which Mary holds the body of her son Jesus after his crucifixion.

Bernhardt, Sarah_After the Storm (detail)

(Related post: “A Breton Prayer”)

Stunned by what the winds and rains have taken from her, the grandmother looks down with disbelieving eyes and a partly open mouth to the limp body of the boy, maybe nine or so, she used to dandle on her knee, and whose innocent laughter rings fresh in her ears from just yesterday. Her cloak and chemise are blown from her shoulders, heightening her vulnerability.

Notice all the different textures Bernhardt renders from a single material: sand and surf, hair and skin, draped fabrics and coarse netting.

Although the boy on whom this figure is based did in fact die, here, his right hand clutches his grandmother’s garment, a sign of life, perhaps, suggesting that he may yet be revived.

After the Storm is a poignant lament whose sting, I’d imagine, is felt especially by those who know the pain of losing a grandchild, or any child in their life.

Roundup: Holocaust survival embroideries, transforming brokenness into beauty, and more

August 3, 2026 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: August 2026 (Art & Theology)

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POEM: “Last Words (Death Row, Texas)” by Eileen Talone: This poem from Image journal’s Winter 2020 issue made me cry. “Formally, it is a villanelle composed of found language from the transcripts of executions in Texas,” writes James K. A. Smith. “It is a poem of last words that the poet has braided together as an elegy, a song of both lament and yearning.”

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PODCAST EPISODE: “Pádraig Ó Tuama: Poetry, and Making Peace, Bearing Witness and Being Human – Poetry Against the Dark,” No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp, November 3, 2025: “‘Legitimate target has sixteen letters—and one long abominable space between two dehumanizing words.’ In this episode, poet and peacebuilder Pádraig Ó Tuama offers a sobering yet luminous reflection on language, theology, and the long road of reconciliation. From exorcisms and conversion therapy to moments of silence, soup, and starlight, his stories remind us that even in a burning world, there is still room for awe, for courage, and for a better kind of human flourishing.”

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EXHIBITION (+ BOOK + VIDEO TOUR): Esther and the Dream of One Loving Human Family, American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, February 23, 2019–December 2030: I recently saw this affecting exhibition at AVAM (the same museum that’s currently showing Mary Proctor), spending a whole afternoon taking in the visual and textual testimony of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz (1927–2001) regarding her survival of the Holocaust. Krinitz was twelve when the Nazis occupied the Polish hamlet of Mniszek, where she lived on a farm with her family. She was able to flee three years later, in 1942, with one of her younger sisters, but she never saw her parents, brother, or other sister again. She emigrated to the United States in 1949, working as a seamstress in Brooklyn and then in Frederick, Maryland, where she spent the remainder of her life.

Krinitz, Esther Nisenthal_Janiszew Prison Camp — Esther Nisenthal Krinitz (Polish American, 1927–2001), *Janiszew Prison Camp*, 1994. Embroidery and fabric collage, 30 1/2 × 40 1/8 in. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. © Bernice Steinhardt and Helene McQuade.

In 1977, at age fifty, Krinitz embroidered an approximately four-by-four-foot panel of her childhood home, her carrying pails of water up the footpath. She wanted to share her memories with her two daughters, Bernice Steinhardt and Helene McQuade. This became the first piece in a series of thirty-six, covering her bucolic childhood—tending geese, swimming in the river, walking through wheat fields on stilts, watching her mom make Passover matzos—and then its sudden disruption by German forces during the war. Her embroidered pictures show such cruelties as a soldier ripping off her father’s prayer shawl and cutting off her grandfather’s beard, and her whole family being pulled out of their beds at dawn and taunted with guns. They show children forced to dig trenches, a family friend’s betrayal, Krinitz hiding out in the woods, death marches, shootings, cabbages growing on human ashes at Maidanek concentration camp, and Nazi corpses hanging from trees after the liberation. Krinitz didn’t finish embroidering her whole life story, but the final image she completed shows her arriving, after living for several years in a refugee camp in Germany, in New York Harbor with her husband and newborn.

To view all the images, visit the Art and Remembrance website, which includes image files as well as a video tour narrated by Steinhardt. I also heartily recommend the beautifully produced book Memories of Survival, which reproduces the full series and provides an introduction, transcriptions of Krinitz’s hand-stitched descriptions, and commentary by Steinhardt.

Krinitz’s art is the primary component and anchor point of the current exhibition in Baltimore—but the exhibition also includes a dozen or so works by other artists that lament atrocities and advocate for an end to violence. “The show pays tribute to humanity’s unjust persecution of innocents and the dream of a world at peace.”

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TED TALK: “How Art Transforms Brokenness into Beauty” by Lily Yeh, April 19, 2024: Chinese American artist Lily Yeh travels the world, building community through the arts and bringing beauty to public spaces often seen as “broken.” In this TED Talk, she describes three of her collaborative projects: establishing an art park in North Philadelphia, which involved the making of murals, sculptures, and mosaics with neighborhood children and adults (a project that evolved into the nonprofit The Village of Arts and Humanities); working with survivors of the Rwandan genocide to create a memorial in Rugerero atop a mass grave (“Where there’s beauty, we see hope,” one survivor told her); and “turning dilapidation into color and abundance” at a middle school for migrant children in rural China.

Yeh is the subject of the 2014 documentary The Barefoot Artist: Healing Communities Through Art, streaming for free on Kanopy and available for rental through other platforms.

I learned about her through the Esther and the Dream of One Loving Human Family exhibition at AVAM (see previous roundup item), where three of her paintings—Village Life in Rwanda Before the 1994 Genocide, Escaping into the Forest, and The 1994 Rwandan Genocide—are on display.

Yeh, Lily_Village Life in Rwanda Before the 1994 Genocide — Lily Yeh (Chinese American, 1941–), *Village Life in Rwanda Before the 1994 Genocide*, 2015. Acrylic on brown paper. Courtesy of the artist.

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SONGS:

>> “The Law of God Is Love” by Kester Limner: Kester Limner wrote this song in June 2020 for a virtual contemplative worship service at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, influenced by the simple, slow, repetitive style of Taizé chant. She shares it under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build on the material in any medium or format, even commercially, as long as attribution is given to the creator.

Love, love, the law of God is love
And to break every chain of oppression
So we work, and we pray, O God, Your kingdom come
May we see the dawn of Your justice

>> “Prayers for Freedom” by MaMuse: “Wholeheartedly fed by the folk and gospel traditions, MaMuse (Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker) create uplifting music to inspire the world into thriving.” “This video,” they write, “was inspired by our love and reverence for water, for friendship cherished and laughter forever praised.” I’ve previously featured the duo here and here.

Roundup: “Rothko in Florence,” disabled minister portraits, Shaker songs, and more

July 25, 2026July 30, 2026 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

EXHIBITIONS:

>> Rothko in Florence, multiple sites in Florence, Italy, March 14–August 23, 2026: Presented by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, Rothko in Florence explores the influence of the city on Mark Rothko’s art, especially in terms of space and color. Rothko visited Florence in 1950, 1959, and 1966 and was particularly taken by the monastery-turned-museum San Marco, its cells frescoed with devotional scenes by Fra Angelico, and the vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, designed by Michelangelo. Now those two Renaissance sites are host to a display of Rothko’s works: five of his paintings hang alongside Fra Angelico’s monastic frescoes, and two studies for his Seagram Murals hang in the Laurentian Library.

But the primary site of the exhibition is the fifteenth-century Palazzo Strozzi, which shows over seventy of Rothko’s works from private collections and international museums, spanning the different stylistic phases of his career, from figurative to neo-surrealist to color field. And in dialogue with the exhibition, the sacristy of the Chapel of San Nicolò, inside the complex of the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, one of the oldest pharmacies in the world, has been converted into a “listening room”; Rothko Chapel, a composition for chorus, celesta, cello, and percussion written by Morton Feldman in 1971 at Rothko’s commission, plays through speakers, washing over frescoed scenes of Christ’s passion painted by Mariotto di Nardo di Cione between 1385 and 1408.

You can read reviews of the exhibition in The New York Times and The Brooklyn Rail and view photos, including of all five relevant cells in San Marco, on Ruth Philo’s Instagram page.

>> Called as We Are, York Minster, July 12–August 10, 2026 (then to other locations): Presented by the Church of England’s Disability Project in partnership with Art and Christianity, this exhibition consists of twelve photographic portraits by Ruth Samuels of leaders in the Church of England who are Deaf, disabled, and/or neurodivergent. “Called As We Are brings Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people in ordained and lay ministries into focus and explores the enriching and dynamic contribution that difference brings to their personal ministries and the ministry of the church,” says Rev. John Beauchamp, a blind priest who serves as disability ministry enabler in the Diocese of London. Samuels, the photographer, herself has chronic fatigue syndrome.

Rev. Vanessa Thornborough, curate at St. Edmund of Canterbury, Hayes, who has a hand difference, is one of the church leaders featured in the Disability Project exhibition *Called as We Are*. Photo by Ruth Samuels.

Each photograph is accompanied by insights and observations from the subject, telling us about their disability, their faith journey, and adaptations that have helped them along their way. There are also audio descriptions, as well as BSL (British Sign Language) interpretation. After its time at York Minster, the exhibition will travel to the following locations:

Exeter Cathedral, August 12–19, 2026
Liverpool Cathedral, September 14–October 4, 2026
Chelmsford Cathedral, October 12–November 9, 2026
St Alban’s Cathedral, November 10–26, 2026
St Giles Cripplegate, London, January 18–February 8, 2027

Read the press release here.

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CALL FOR ART: St. Francis Exhibition, Creo Arts Gallery, Wilmore, Kentucky: “This November, Creo Arts invites you to explore the life, legacy, and spiritual vision of St. Francis through the arts. Whether inspired by his care for creation, his radical hospitality, his pursuit of peace, or the beauty of a life fully surrendered to God, we welcome works that engage with the enduring themes of his witness. Through painting, sculpture, poetry, photography, music, and more, this exhibition celebrates a life that continues to inspire artists and believers across generations.” Submission deadline: September 13, 2026. Selection emails will be sent out by September 21. The exhibition opening is November 6, and participating artists are encouraged but not required to attend.

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ARTICLE: “Take me to church: Ecclesiology and Hulu’s The Bear” by Beth Felker Jones: “I want a church like a fine dining restaurant with a pickup window serving Chicago style beef sandwiches.” This is how theologian Beth Felker Jones opens her latest Substack post, drawing the hit television drama The Bear into conversation with ecclesiology, the study of the church. She critiques the either/or mentality that says the church has to either devote itself to beauty, depth, liturgy, theology, and careful formation or be accessible and meet practical needs; be specialized and transporting or down-to-earth, ordinary. Why can’t it be both? She then proceeds to reflect on hospitality, family (born and found), and giftedness.

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SHAKER SONGS:

Saro Lynch-Thomason is a song leader and folklorist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She identifies as pagan, but a number of songs in her repertoire are from the Christian tradition, including these two from Shakerism, a near-extinct sect whose distinctive practices include celibacy, communal living, and gender equality.

>> “In Yonder’s Valley”: This is the most widely remembered of the early Shaker songs. Written at Enfield, Connecticut, by Father James Whittaker (1751–1787), the second leader of the Shaker sect after Mother Ann Lee, it draws on the paradisal imagery in the second chapter of the Song of Songs (a reference shared by two other songs I’ve recently featured!), bidding the community to enter into unity with God, each other, and the rest of creation—to “take [their] fill” of heaven on earth, living in the cosmic harmony that has been ordained from the beginning. A variation of the song has “yonder” instead of “yonder’s” and “flows” instead of “grows.”

In yonder’s valley there grows sweet union
Let us arise and take our fill
The winter’s past and the spring appears
The turtledove is in our land
In yonder’s valley there grows sweet union
Let us arise and take our fill

>> “Ode to Contentment”: This Shaker hymn has been passed down with varying attributions of authorship and places of origin, but it was most likely written by Richard Pelham (words) and Issachar Bates (music) at the North Union Shaker village in Ohio in 1835. It apostrophizes the Christian virtue of contentment, asking her to come dwell in our hearts, bringing a stabilizing peace, endurance, and bliss. Lynch-Thomason sings three of the original nine verses.

Come, contentment, lovely guest!
Reign unrivaled in my breast;
Thou alone wilt do.
Thou alone canst fill the soul,
Every passion canst control;
When the stormy billows roll,
Thou canst bear me through.

All the lordlings of the earth,
All their boasts, what is it worth?
Nothing but a show.
All the wealth that kings possess,
All their vain and gaudy dress,
All is splendid wretchedness;
Peace they never know.

Nothing on this earth below,
Naught that heaven can bestow,
Fills the soul with peace,
If contentment dwell not there.
All is dreary, dark, and bare;
She alone makes heavenly fare,
She alone is bliss.

Roundup: Free arts festival, “Bloom Before the Lord Forever,” John Hendrix on visual storytelling, and more

July 16, 2026 Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

EVENT: Art and Wonder Festival, Belmont University, Nashville, September 26, 2026: “The Art & Wonder Festival is a free event at Belmont University showcasing art and music that celebrates the Christian story. Experience live music, film screenings, art exhibitions, hands-on art activities, kids zone, food trucks, and more!”

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SUBSTACK SERIES: “A Vision for Theology, the Arts, and Gospel Witness” by Wesley Vander Lugt: “As a part of my role directing the Leighton Ford Initiative in Theology, the Arts, and Gospel Witness at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I am tasked with shepherding a vision for integrating the story of God, the gift of the arts, and their educational and missional impact,” Wesley Vander Lugt writes in this excellent, short four-part series. Using the biblical metanarrative framework of Formation–Deformation–Transformation–Re-formation (or, as some Christians phrase it, Creation–Fall–Redemption–New Creation), he explains how “God’s grace makes it possible to receive the arts as a gift for expressing embodied worship, deepening spiritual formation, reshaping emotions, grasping complex truth, cultivating keystone habits, nurturing community, and effectively contextualizing the gospel.”

Part 1, “The Arts and Formation,” looks at the ways in which God’s work of creation and formation influences our affirmations of art, beauty, materiality, and the human body. Part 2, “The Arts and Deformation,” explores how the deformation of sin and evil impacts human creativity and artistry. Part 3, “The Arts and Transformation,” unpacks the role of the arts in God’s transformative mission to make all things new in Christ by the Spirit. Part 4, “The Arts and Re-formation,” shows how hope and the future of God informs human artistry and creativity.

The arts of all kinds—music, visual art, literature, dance, film, theatre, architecture, and more—are a gift for deepening our engagement with God’s Word, enlivening teaching methods and environments, attuning our imaginations to the ministry of God, forming the whole person toward Christlikeness, preparing students for effective cultural engagement and presence, and strengthening our vision of God’s redemptive work in the past, present, and future.

—Wesley Vander Lugt

Some of the affirmations of the program include:

“We affirm that the materiality and embodied nature of the arts is exceedingly good as an extension of God’s delight in the physical world he made.”
“We affirm the goodness of the human body, established in creation and upheld in Jesus’ incarnation and resurrection, and therefore the place of the naked human figure within artistic tradition and practice when treated with honor and respect.”
“We affirm the ability of the arts to help us grapple with the brokenness of the world and the gravity of sin, and we commit to avoiding the opposite errors of sentimentality and gratuitousness.”
“We affirm the integral role of the arts in the process of education, discipleship, and mission by virtue of the arts’ ability to engage the whole person and the whole church with the whole gospel. As such, we lament that the Church has often viewed the arts as playing a mere decorative or illustrative function.
“We affirm the educational value of the arts while also affirming that the arts should not be reduced to their instructional function. While an artwork can communicate a powerful message, that message often remains allusive and multivalent, and art offers much more than propositional content.”
“We affirm the role of artistic portrayals of God, particularly the Word who became flesh, not as objects of worship as prohibited by the second commandment (Exodus 20:4-6), but as aids for deepening our devotion to the God who is beyond our capacity to imagine.”

I have been a beneficiary of the program, having attended some of its events, and am thrilled to see it growing—they recently announced an online, six-course Graduate Certificate in Theology and the Arts! Vander Lugt’s approach to the arts in seminary education is very well thought-out and executed. For those considering launching an art program at your church or other Christian institution, I encourage you to read these posts that provide justification for such, laying a strong biblical foundation.

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SONGS:

>> “Let It Shine,” performed by Davóne Tines and The Truth: Blending music and testimony, REVIVAL is an interactive concert experience created by the acclaimed bass-baritone Davóne Tines and his ensemble, The Truth, which debuted May 25, 2026, at the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. “Centered on themes of memory, community, and spiritual renewal, REVIVAL invited audiences to consider the question, ‘What needs to be revived in us?’ Through music, spoken reflection, and collective participation, the performance drew upon the traditions of the AME Church and the revival service to create a shared experience of contemplation, remembrance, and hope.” “Let It Shine” [previously] was the concluding song—a powerful expression of resilience, faith, and communal witness.

REVIVAL was presented by the Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts in partnership with Spoleto Festival USA.

>> “Bloom Before the Lord Forever” by Conner David McCain, performed by the Choir of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, dir. Peter Latona: The lyrics of this a cappella choral piece are primarily from the Song of Songs (2:1, 11–13; 4:1). The title line, which appears in the Sanctorale Catholicum (Book of Saints) in reference to Wiborada of St. Gall, echoes the garden imagery of the Song of Songs as well as Psalm 92:12: “The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.”

I am the flower of the field.
I am the lily of the valley.

For winter is now past,
the rains are over and gone.
The flowers have appeared in our land,
the time for pruning is come.
Arise, my love, my beautiful one.

Bloom before the Lord forever.

You are beautiful, O my love,
my heart, my lily of the valley.

The composer told me “Bloom Before the Lord Forever” was the first work he completed after the birth of his first child, Lily, in February 2023. The title line, he said, “sums up what I want the piece to be: a prayer that my daughter may bloom before the Lord for all time.” As for the other lines: In the Song of Songs, they are spoken between two lovers, but the church has also long interpreted them as voicing the passionate desire between God and the human soul, or Christ and his church. Knowing that McCain set this poetry to music with his newborn daughter in mind, who shares her name with the flower of lines 2 and 10, I now also hear the piece as an expression of an earthly parent’s love and blessing for their beautiful little girl, wishing her a life of flourishing.

Purchase the score at https://www.connermccain.com/product-page/bloom-before-the-lord-forever.

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LECTURES:

Run by St. Philip the Deacon Lutheran Church in Plymouth, Minnesota, since 2003, “the Faith & Life Lecture Series exists to create welcoming and accessible public forums for members of the Twin Cities community to hear nationally known speakers reflect on how Christian faith is related to different dimensions of everyday life.” The talks—five per year—are always free public events, and most are video-recorded (browse their YouTube page). Here are two from last season that I especially enjoyed and that relate to the work of Art & Theology:

>> “Faith and Imagination: Art for the Soul” by Lanta Davis, October 9, 2025: Lanta Davis [previously] is a professor of humanities and literature at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana. Here she discusses ways that historically, Christians have trained their imaginations: (1) merging story and image in designing their spaces (catacombs, house churches, cathedrals, chapels, baptisteries), (2) using art to help us see the stories of scripture as alive and unfolding, and from new perspectives (e.g., Daniel in the lions’ den, Bathsheba at her bath, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, the Annunciation, the Crucifixion), and (3) making abstract theological concepts and virtues, such as hope, visible (e.g., through allegory). The Q&A starts at 52:25.

>> “Faith and Illustration: The Art of Visual Storytelling” by John Hendrix, November 13, 2025: The New York Times best-selling illustrator and author John Hendrix presents an overview of his creative work and the bigger ideas behind it, from the comics and board games he made in high school to his most recent graphic novel, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. He also shares samples from his children’s books, his client work (for, e.g., National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Christianity Today) and reportage, and his sermon sketchbook—and about being invited by Disney to draw a Star Wars “memory wall” using attendee input at a D23 convention! I enjoyed learning more about what a career in illustration could look like. During the Q&A, which starts at 53:38, Hendrix is asked, among other things, how he knows which ideas are worth investing time in, what he’s currently working on (a project I’m excited about!), and which artists inspire him.