Not only are humans tired and stressed and in need of deliverance; so is the environment. Today’s two featured works function as a call to care for the earth—the one a performative enactment of said care, tender and consoling, and the other an urgent lament by choir.
The gospel is for more than just humanity; it’s for all the earth—animals and insects, plants and soil, skies and oceans. All creation groans for redemption, Paul says in his letter to the early church in Rome. And in the final book of the Bible, John the Revelator’s vision is of the whole world renewed.
LOOK: Earth Rite by Holly Slingsby
Holly Slingsby (British, 1983–), Earth Rite, performance at St Pancras Church, London, July 6, 2024. Duration: 1 hour. Photo: Adam Papaphilippopoulos.
Artist Holly Slingsby’s Earth Rite premiered at the Ritual/Bodies live performance event that took place at St Pancras Church in London on July 6, 2024, organized by Dr. Kate Pickering. It was one of eight performance works by eight different artists (one work was by two performers; two works were by one) that collectively spanned some three hours, followed by a ninety-minute panel discussion.
In Earth Rite, “a solo performer sits atop a mound of earth, cradling it in her arms. The earth slips away only to be regathered, in a continuous act of generating, losing, and regenerating.” Charles Pickstone, an Anglican priest, reviewed the work in the Autumn 2024 issue of Art + Christianity journal, writing:
Holly Slingsby, in a loose white dress, sat on the church steps on a mound of rich soil, arms folded in embrace. Where one might have expected a baby, the artist was embracing armfuls of soil, constantly replenishing her burden as the soil slipped away from her. Part earth mother, part mourner, on the edge of the busy and noisy Euston Road, the artist made what could have been rather a moralistic revisiting of a well-known theme (compare William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Charity, perhaps an influence on this work) into a courageous and compelling glimpse of the earth’s abused and vulnerable soil.
Slingsby reprised the performance on September 27, 2025, at the International Forum of Performance Art in Drama, Greece.
LISTEN: “Kasar mie la Gaji” (The Earth Is Tired) by Alberto Grau, 1987 | Performed by Stellenbosch University Choir, dir. André van der Merwe, 2024
“Kasar mie la gaji” is a Hausa saying from the Sahel region of Africa that means roughly “The earth is tired.” In 1987 leading contemporary Venezuelan composer Alberto Grau (b. 1937) set it to music, creating a magnetic choral composition for, in his words, “an international mobilization to save THE EARTH.”
In their performance notes, the Stellenbosch University Choir from South Africa writes: “The composition is designed on hypnotic repetition, with a steady reiteration of the text. Plaintive glissandos and layered ostinato patterns create a compelling chant, begging for justice and rebirth.”
Kathy Romey, the director of choral activities at the University of Minnesota, offers further description:
The work is broken into three distinct sections, of which the first and third incorporate short melodic motives combined with rhythms from traditional South American dance music intensified by clapping and stomping. The middle section is a slow lament and utilizes various special effects for a cappella chorus, including glissandi, whispering, talking, and hissing.
Why is the earth tired? Because we are depleting her resources. We are disrupting her ecosystems. The carbon emissions from our burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation are trapping heat in her atmosphere and causing extreme weather.
Lord, have mercy. Please help us restore our planet to health and treat her with respect, recognizing that she, as part of your creation, is precious to you.
Among this month’s thirty spiritual songs of note are three by Indigenous artists of Turtle Island (North America):
>> “Ambe Anishinaabeg” from Cree composer Andrew Balfour’s Nagamo project, which explores the intersections of Indigenous song and Anglican choral music. The Ojibway text of “Ambe Anishinaabeg” was gifted to Balfour by Cory Campbell: “Ambe Anishinaabeg / Biindigeg Anishinaabeg / Mino-bimaadiziwin omaa” (Come in, two-legged beings / Come in, all people / There is good life here). On the album (and the playlist), the text is set to the “Gloria in excelsis Deo” by the late English Renaissance composer Thomas Weelkes; but in another iteration, captured in the following video, Balfour pairs the text with the music of William Byrd’s “Sing Joyfully” (itself a setting of Psalm 81:1–4). (Balfour has also written original music for Campbell’s text.) See the third roundup item for more about Nagamo.
>> “Jesus I Always Want to Be Near to You,” a solo by Doc Tate Nevaquaya (1932–1996) on Native American flute. Nevaquaya, who was Comanche, played an important role in the revival of the Native American flute in the 1970s, expanding the repertoire and playing techniques. This instrumental is one of twelve from the album Comanche Flute Music, originally released in 1979 by Folkway Records, which also includes Nevaquaya’s adaptations of non-Comanche flute melodies, his own compositions, and one piece by his son Edmund. As he states in his introduction to this track, “Jesus I Always Want to Be Near You” is an original Christian hymn written by the Comanche people. I couldn’t find the lyrics, but to listen to some more Comanche hymns, with words, see this video by Comanche Nation tribal members Anthony Nauni and Chad Tahchawwickah, and this recorded gathering at Lawton Indian Baptist Church in Oklahoma.
>> “naká·yè·ʔr sihskę̀·nęʔ (may it be that you have peace)” by Tuscarora singer Jennifer Kreisburg, a song of blessing from the new Yo-Yo Ma EP Our Common Nature. According to Sony Classical, the song expresses “hope for a future where humanity and nature coexist in harmony.” I just started listening to the album’s wonderful companion podcast, for which four of the seven episodes have been released.
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Also for November: See my Thanksgiving Playlist [introduction], comprising a hundred-plus songs of gratitude, with a few recent additions at the bottom; and my Christ the King Playlist [introduction], which I made for the final feast of the church year, celebrated Sunday, November 23, this year.
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ALBUM: Nagamo by Andrew Balfour: In May and June 2022, the Vancouver-based vocal ensemble musica intima teamed up with composer Andrew Balfour to create Nagamo (Cree for “sings”), a concert and CD recording that reimagines the Anglican choral tradition through an Indigenous lens. A child of the Sixties Scoop, Balfour was born in 1967 in the Fisher River Cree Nation near Winnipeg but at six weeks old was forcibly removed from his birth family by child welfare authorities of Manitoba and adopted by white parents. He says his childhood was happy, and that he was fortunate to have been put in a men and boy’s choir from a young age, where he received a musical education and international travel opportunities; but of course, the sudden rupture from his culture of origin left wounds.
With Nagamo, Balfour seeks to bring together his identities as Cree and as the son of Anglicans of Scottish descent, who raised him in the church (his father was a minister); his love of Renaissance choral music, much of which voices polyphonic praises to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and an Indigenous spiritual sensibility. The album comprises two original compositions (including one in Scots Gaelic), five Renaissance songs retexted (not translated) in Cree or Ojibway, and five unaltered works by William Byrd and Alfonso Ferrabosco. “The concept mines the fantastical question of what might have happened musically should Indigenous and European musics and cultural expressions come together in a manner collaborative and respectful, rather than divisive,” writes music journalist Andrew Scott for The WholeNote.
Examples of the adaptations include “Four Directions,” a recitation in Ojibway of the four cardinal directions—Ningaabiianong (West), Giiwedinong (North), Wabanong (East), Zhaawanong (South)—set to Thomas Tallis’s “Te lucis ante terminum” [previously], a prayer for protection through the night. And “Ispiciwin” (Journey), whose musical basis is Orlando Gibbons’s “Drop, drop, slow tears,” a Christian hymn of contrition, but whose Cree lyrics make reference instead to a smudging ceremony, a sacred cleansing ritual practiced by many Indigenous peoples. Here’s a mini-documentary about the Nagamo project:
Balfour “re-imagines how settler and Indigenous spiritualities can interact with one another. In essence, Balfour imagines a new system of power relations where both spiritualities can co-exist and engage in dialogue without the power imbalances of colonization,” Lukas Sawatsky writes in his master’s thesis Converging Paths: Settler Colonialism and the Canadian Choral Tradition, the final chapter of which explores Nagamo as a case study of “the reclaiming of settler-originated aesthetic models and genres by Indigenous people for their own storytelling purposes.” Sawatsky continues, “Through the lens of the Anglican choral tradition, Balfour synthesises his Indigenous cultural identity into music that proudly celebrates both parts, without resolving their differences. Through this, Balfour looks towards a world where the settlers and Indigenous people can exist without settler colonialism.”
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EVENT RECORDING:“A Timbered Choir: The Witness of Creation,”Wheaton College, Illinois, October 28, 2025: Last week the Marion E. Wade Center and the Conservatory of Music at Wheaton College presented “A Timbered Choir: The Witness of Creation,” an evening of music and poetry inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s and Wendell Berry’s love of creation and visions of stewardship. Readings and reflections by Wheaton professors from across the disciplines of biology, literature, and art culminated in the world premiere of a new Wade Center commission, a fifteen-minute choral cycle by Josh Rodriguez called A Timbered Choir, which sets to music three poems by Berry. “It was my aim to create a work which captures a sense of awe: at the trees which play such an important role in our fragile ecosystem, at the beauty and life-giving pleasure they provide for us, and at our urgent responsibility to care for them,” Rodriguez explains. “In this three-part tale on the life of trees, the audience is invited to witness an opening lullaby about the birth of the forest, followed by a desperate lament on the destruction of nature’s life-giving biodiversity, and a concluding celebration of nature’s resilience.”
The Wade Center is dedicated to promoting the study of seven British Christian writers: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Wendell Berry—an American poet, novelist, and farmer especially known for his “Sabbath poems,” an expansive series he wrote over decades during his Sunday walks in the woods—is not part of their archive. But Wade Center Director Jim Beitler says they built this recent event around Berry because they want to encourage learners not just to look at the seven authors but to look with them, at the things they cared about. The center identified particular resonance between Berry and Tolkien.
Here are the time stamps from the video recording. The songs are performed by the Wheaton College Concert Choir under the direction of John William Trotter:
Opening remarks by Jim Beitler, director of the Wade Center
Also, the Armerding Center for Music and the Arts, where the event was held, is hosting tree-related art in the lobby: Cross of the Feast by Sung Hwan Kim (a crucifix in wood and mixed media made for a past KOSTA [Korean Students All Nations] Conference at Wheaton), permanently installed; and a set of graphite drawings by David Hooker, on display through Christmas break.
ARTICLE: “Regarding the Face of God: On the Paintings, Drawings, and Notebooks of Paul Thek” by Wallace Ludel, Triangle House Review:Last month I wrote about a chalk drawing by Paul Thek that the Archdiocese of Cologne curated for its latest exhibition at Kolumba museum. In preparation for writing, I did some basic research about the artist, who’s best known for his “Meat Pieces,” and was led to this fascinating article that focuses instead on his paintings, drawings, and notebooks, especially the religiosity and contradictions they are charged with.
Writer Wallace Ludel describes Thek’s “Diver” paintings of 1969–70, speculated to have been inspired by an ancient fresco inside the Tomb of the Diver in Paestum, Italy, as “at once ebullient and lonesome, womb-like and deathly.”
Thek identified as a “predominately gay” Catholic man and was even accepted as a novice by a Carthusian monastery in Vermont shortly before he died of AIDS in 1988. From 1970 onward, he kept notebooks where he copied long passages from spiritual texts and wrote his own devotional musings, as well as made drawings and watercolors and recorded various diaristic thoughts and mantras. One set of the pages, for example, titled “96 Sacraments,” enumerates ninety-six activities—“to breathe . . . to pee . . . to do the dishes . . . to forget bad things . . .”—each followed by the refrain “Praise the Lord.” This list evinces the spiritual influence of Brother Lawrence, who talked about “practicing the presence of God” in all things, which Thek remarked on in a 1984 letter to the Carthusians.
Thek is an artist I had never heard of prior to seeing his work exhibited at Kolumba. Visiting art museums, taking note of the works that intrigue you, and following up afterward with online searches to see and learn more is a great way to develop knowledge of the art that’s out there and to start to identify some of your own personal favorites—which is one of the primary questions I get asked. (“Where do you find all this art?”)
CHILDREN’S BOOK: Let There Be Light by Desmond Tutu, illustrated by Nancy Tillman: I saw this enchanting little book at my local library recently—a retelling of the creation narrative from Genesis 1 by the late South African Anglican bishop, theologian, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu. Published by Zonderkidz in 2014, it opens, “In the very beginning, God’s love bubbled over when there was nothing else . . .” Hear it read aloud, and view the illustrations, in this video from the Seuss’s Gooses YouTube channel:
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ARTICLES:
>> “Artist Traveled to Over 30 Cities to Perform Tea Ceremony with Strangers,” an interview with Pierre Sernet by Jessica Stewart: From 2001 to 2008, artist Pierre Sernet (French-born and residing in Japan) traveled to over thirty countries to spontaneously enact abbreviated Japanese tea ceremonies, inviting passersby to come sit and drink the cup of matcha he prepared in front of them. From deserts and beaches to villages and construction sites, he would set up a portable wood cube that denoted the “tea room,” and the ensuing encounters were documented with photography. Called One (and nicknamed Guerrilla Tea), the series was meant to promote respect across cultures and “to emphasize to viewers the importance of each moment we live in.”
>> “A Teeter-Totter Style Bench Invites Sitters to Find Common Ground” by Grace Ebert: “In the Garden of Generations in Einbeck, Germany, a playful new installation asks park goers to find equilibrium with their neighbors. ‘Balance Bench” is the latest project of Berlin-based artist Martin Binder. Installed in his hometown, the interactive artwork rests on a central cylinder rather than four legs, requiring that at least two people sit on either side to level. ‘It cannot be used alone—it demands awareness, consensus, and cooperation between people to become a functional public space,’ he says.”
Martin Binder (German, 1990–), Balance Bench, 2025. Steel, oak. Installation at the Garden of Generations, Einbeck, Germany. Construction by Henning Müller Sondermaschinen. Photo by Spieker Fotografie.
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PHOTO SERIES: Hierotopia by Kieran Dodds: “Kieran Dodds (Scottish, b. 1980) is a non-fiction photographer known for his research-driven photo stories and portraiture. His personal work considers the interplay of environment and culture, and the importance of spiritual belief in global conservation.” In his Hierotopia series (from the Greek for “sacred place”), carried out from 2015 to 2018, he explores the green “church forests” east of Lake Tana in Ethiopia—little islands of biodiversity scattered throughout the region’s desert landscape. “To its guardians,” Dodds writes, “each forest resembles a miniature Garden of Eden and is essential to the dignity of the building. . . . The air inside the forests is cool, fragrant and filled with a cacophony of life. This is in stark contrast to the arid silence of the surrounding land which is feeling the strain of centuries of human activity and agriculture.”
Debre Mihret Arbiatu Ensesa church near Anbesame, Ethiopia, surrounded by woodland and fields. Photo: Kieran Dodds, from the Hierotopia series, 2015–18.
“The core Christian belief in stewardship for the environment is a powerful concept,” Dodds continues, remarking on the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s commitment to conservation, “and, if applied globally by people who are at least nominally Christian, could transform the world for better.”
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SONGS:
>> “Hold You in Our Circle” by Emily Roblyn: This simple song of blessing by UK-based singer-songwriter and retreat leader Emily Roblyn has been sung at the bedsides of the sick or dying, over women about to be released from prison, and through myriad other life transitions and trials, by friends and communities seeking to voice their support. “We hold you in our circle, hold you in our love.” [HT: Nadia Bolz-Weber]
>> “The Lord Bless You and Keep You” by Peter C. Lutkin: Performed by the Capital University Chapel Choir in 2020, this song is a choral setting by the Midwestern composer Peter C. Lutkin (1858–1931) of the Aaronic Blessing from Numbers 6:24–26: (in Lutkin’s rendering) “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD lift his countenance upon you, and give you peace; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you.” God instructed the Levitical priests of ancient Israel to pronounce these words over the people, and though the Levitical priesthood is no more, this particular benediction is still used regularly in Jewish and Christian liturgies.
“The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland . . .”
—Isaiah 43:20 (NIV)
This verse from the prophetic book of Isaiah supplies the title of artist Josh Tiessen’s Streams in the Wasteland series. Comprising seventeen paintings of wild animals inhabiting abandoned cities, it took six years to complete, from 2015 to 2021. In this body of work Tiessen weds a biblical imagination with his passion for wildlife conservation to promote ecological ethics, or what Christians call “creation care”—the biblical imperative to be benevolent stewards of the environment and all its creatures. He says he wants to represent “the majesty, particularity, and beauty of animals” (Streams in the Wasteland, p. 33)—to evoke wonder, love, and empathy, and a greater sense of responsibility.
“The whole creation has been groaning,” the apostle Paul writes in Romans 8, seeking to “be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” Creation has been damaged in large part by humanity’s sin, which has caused deforestation, land degradation, ozone depletion, and species endangerment and extinction, among other harms. Instead of enjoying the full flourishing God intended, the natural world suffers.
Streams in the Wasteland engages with the question, What would the liberation of animals from the bondage to decay look like? Some of Tiessen’s creative visual responses:
An Indian temple elephant breaks free of its shackles, no more to be prodded and paraded for the people’s religious festivals.
Released from aquarium amusement parks where they were exploited for entertainment, a pod of orcas journeys down a canyon river into the ocean past their ancestors’ skeletal remains, which will one day rise.
A jackalope—the mythical horned rabbit of North American folklore—sheds its antlers, a passing shadow of the old world. Rabbits with hornlike protrusions on or near their heads have actually been found in nature, the cancerous growths a result of a papillomavirus.
Josh Tiessen (Canadian, 1995–), Liberation of the Jackalope, 2018. Oil on braced Baltic birch, 21 × 29 in.
Tiessen calls his style “narrative hypersurrealism,” as he renders the animals with technical precision and great attention to naturalistic detail (hyperrealism) but places them in a postapocalyptic context, revealing strange beauty in the unexpected (surrealism). And in contrast to traditional wildlife art, Tiessen’s art tells a story. For Streams in the Wasteland, that story is one of reclamation and healing—but also one of warning for those who neglect God’s laws.
In preparation for this series, Tiessen wrote a research paper on zoological motifs in the book of Isaiah. He found that in several prophecies of judgment, God gives animals dominion over human civilization—an ironic reversal, the “weak” shaming the powerful.
Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the pride and glory of the Babylonians, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah. She will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations; there no nomads will pitch their tents, there no shepherds will rest their flocks. But desert creatures will lie there, jackals will fill her houses; there the owls will dwell, and there the wild goats will leap about. Hyenas will inhabit her strongholds, jackals her luxurious palaces. Her time is at hand, and her days will not be prolonged.
In addition to Babylon, Isaiah indicts other unjust nations: in Cush the fruit of the vine “will all be left to the mountain birds of prey” (18:6), and in Edom “the desert owl and screech owl will possess it; the great owl and the raven will nest there” (34:11). Concerning the kingdom of Judah: moles and bats will take over idols of silver and gold (2:20), lambs will feed on the food of the rich (5:17), and Jerusalem will become void of human activity and instead be “the delight of donkeys, a pasture for flocks” (32:14). It’s not just nocturnal animals and scavengers that crop up, but also harmless ones like foals and sheep.
Returning to the opening quote of this article, we see that Isaiah describes an eschatological reality in which God’s abundant provision elicits thanksgiving and praise from the animal kingdom. But they are Israel’s foil: whereas the animals are sensible of God’s goodness, God’s people are not. “Yet you have not called on me, Jacob. . . . You have burdened me with your sins and wearied me with your offenses” (43:22, 24).
Tiessen understands such animals “as the Creator’s special agents worthy of intrinsic value and a role in history. I caught a glimpse of Isaiah’s larger vision for animals serving as co-workers with the Creator to confront humanity, calling from within the ruins of human moral decay” (Streams in the Wasteland, p. 22).
Therefore, in Streams in the Wasteland, a barn owl stakes its place on a plinth of a Gothic cathedral alongside sculptures of the saints, meerkats lounge on a chaise inside a Baroque manor, lar gibbons swing from the entryway of a university, and a pack of spotted hyenas wanders through Bodie, a California Gold Rush boomtown known for its sin, now a ghost town.
Josh Tiessen (Canadian, 1995–), Occidental Babylon, 2017. Oil on braced Baltic birch, 52 × 75 in.
I’m very familiar with the Isaiah passages where creatures are presented as blessings of Edenic hope for the future, existing peaceably with humans (e.g., Isa. 11:6–9), but I had never really stopped to consider all the places where they are said to overtake what we deem human domains. Such passages are certainly more uncomfortable for us humans!
Though humans’ neglect or mistreatment of animals is not specifically what prompts God’s pledged use of animals to shame the rebellious nations, surely our disregard for the creation mandate in Genesis—to rule the earth with care and compassion—is a form of rebellion against God. And so Tiessen extends his reading of Isaiah to address that call in particular, which is echoed in other parts of scripture, such as Proverbs 12:10: “The righteous care for the needs of their animals.” By placing animals in human habitations, Tiessen compels us to remember our obligations to our nonhuman neighbors.
Perhaps my favorite painting from Tiessen’s series is Whale Hymn. The setting is the ruined shell of St. Dunstan-in-the-East, a twelfth-century church that once towered over the city of London but that was irreparably bombed during World War II. It has since been converted into a public garden. In his futuristic vision, Tiessen imagines it surrounded by floodwaters, a humpback whale swimming by. This giant of the deep sings its song to the Creator in the same place where generation after generation of Christians sang their praises until human violence rendered the building unusable.
Josh Tiessen (Canadian, 1995–), Whale Hymn, 2015. Oil on braced Baltic birch, 36 × 48 in.
Isaiah is not the only biblical source of inspiration for Tiessen. Ezekiel’s vision in the valley of dry bones inspired Can These Bones Live?, which shows a monarch butterfly gliding through the ribcage of a human skeleton, and its sequel, Rise Up—the only two paintings with human figures.
Tiessen was born in 1995 in Moscow to Canadian missionary parents. His Russian nanny, Lena Zhuk, taught him drawing basics, like perspective and shading, and, when he showed aptitude, bought him his first set of tempera paints, brushes, large heavy paper, and other materials. When he and his family moved back to Canada, Valerie Jones, a fellow church member and artist, noticed his talent and got him his first public art exhibition at age eleven. Then when Tiessen was fifteen, Canadian wildlife artist Robert Bateman took him on as a student and mentee. He graduated from high school at age sixteen and began exhibiting throughout North America while working on a bachelor’s of religious education in arts and biblical studies at Emmanuel Bible College in Kitchener, Ontario, which he earned in 2020. His professional memberships include Artists for Conservation, the Society of Animal Artists, and the International Guild of Realism.
He currently lives in Stoney Creek, Ontario.
Tiessen has self-published a hardcover, glossy-paged, full-color book that collates all the works from Streams in the Wasteland, providing commentary on them (additional to that on his website), which includes engagement with scholarly interpretations of the Isaiah passages. Through sketches and more, he sheds light on his artistic process and also provides autobiographical information. The book comes with a CD of instrumental compositions by his brother Zac Tiessen that respond to each of the paintings—an atmospheric soundscape. It would make a great gift.
The culmination of the series is Agnus Dei, a triptych featuring all the animals in the individual paintings gathering around a horned altar where the Lamb of God lies slain. Tiessen drew inspiration from Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, Francisco de Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei, and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich featuring abandoned abbeys, churches, and cemeteries in winter.
Instead of saints from the Homo sapiens species surrounding the Lamb in worship, Tiessen shows a giant panda, a double-wattled cassowary, a narwhal, and other animals paying homage to Christ. They, too, are drawn up into God’s awesome story of redemption. They, too, participate in the “new thing” God is doing.
“My painting is . . . a critique of the human-centric bias within Western art history,” Tiessen writes. “This is best seen in Renaissance paintings where animals seldom appear, and if they do, it is simply for allegorical purposes. By enlisting wild animals as protagonists with intrinsic value amidst the wasteland of human existence, I endeavor to revise Western art history through a zoological lens, liberating the Judeo-Christian worldview from its perversion at the hands of anthropocentric Greek philosophy.”
This final image shows animals liberated from the effects of the fall, honoring the One whose atoning death and resurrection reconciles all to God (Col. 1:19–20).
To see which of these paintings are available for purchase—either the originals or reproductions or notecards—visit https://www.joshtiessen.com/store.
PRAYER COMPILATION: “Prayers for a Violent World” by W. David O. Taylor: “How exactly do we pray in the aftermath of violence? What words should we put on our lips? What can the whole people of God say ‘amen’ to and what might only one of us be able to say amen to in good conscience? These questions are, of course, far from easy to answer, but over the past couple of years I have attempted to give language to such matters and I have included here a number of those prayers, in the hope that they might prove useful, and perhaps comforting, to people who face the terrors and traumas of violent activities on a regular basis.” Included are prayers After a Mass Shooting, Against Bloodthirstiness, For Loving a Hurting Neighbor, For Enemies, For Bitter Lament, For Peace in a Time of War, For Those Who Weary of Doing Justice, and more.
Alfred Kubin (Austrian, 1877–1959), War, 1903
Here’s Taylor’s Prayer of Allegiance to the Prince of Peace:
O Lord, you who deserve all our loyalties, we pledge allegiance this day to the Lamb of God and to the upside-down Kingdom for which he stands, one holy nation under God, the Servant King and the Prince of Peace, with liberty and justice for all without remainder. We pray this in the name of the Holy Trinity. Amen.
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NEW ALBUMS:
>> Sorrow’s Got a Hold on Me by Paul Zach: On May 20, singer-songwriter Paul Zachwrote on his Instagram, “My new album of thirteen sad church songs is out today! Many of these songs were written right after one of my weekly EMDR therapy sessions, as I have been working through the sorrow, trauma, and grief of the past few years. I’m learning to bring all of myself to God in prayer and songwriting, which includes my sorrow and anger. I’ve always heard that God shows up in a unique way in times of grief but that has not been my experience. These songs are an invitation for the ‘man of sorrows’ to join me in my grief.”
Zach often writes collaboratively (including as part of the Porter’s Gate! see below), and the cowriters on some of the songs here are Kate Bluett, Latifah Alattas (Page CXVI), Nick Chambers, Orlando Palmer (IAMSON), Jessica Fox, Alex Johnson, and Philip Zach. There are also a few guest vocalists.
>> Climate Vigil Songs by the Porter’s Gate:The Porter’s Gate is a collective of fifty-plus songwriters, musicians, scholars, pastors, and music industry professionals from a variety of Christian worship traditions and cultural backgrounds, making music for churches. This sixth album of theirs, made in partnership with the #ClimateVigil movement, is themed around environmental justice and creation care. Below are videos for “Brother Son (Giving Glory!)” and “Jubilee.”
Besides “Brother Sun,” my favorite tracks are “Satisfied,” a prayer that we would stop seeking to build our wealth (a motive that drives a lot of environmental injustices) and instead be grateful for God’s provision; “The Kingdom Is Coming,” a marchlike call-and-response song that rallies us to pray, wait, and work for an end to creation’s groaning; and “Water to Wine,” which wonders at the miraculous process of planting and growing grapes for harvest. There’s also “All Creatures Lament,” a minor-key arrangement of “All Creatures of Our God and King” with new lyrics that enjoin the animals to mourn habitat loss, air pollution, and other results of humans’ power abuses and irresponsible stewardship.
To learn more about the album, listen to this great interview with Porter’s Gate cofounder and producer Isaac Wardell; it’s from the RESOUNDworship Songwriting Podcast, hosted by Joel Payne. Wardell discusses the vision for Climate Vigil Songs, and especially the difficulty, with thematic albums, of avoiding the pitfalls of being too heavy-handed with the messaging on the one hand, and on the other, being so vague that people don’t see the connection. There’s also a need for tonal balance, and for songs that fill different functions.
We wanted to write for this album at least three different kinds of songs. One kind is essentially songs of lament—songs lamenting the state of creation because of human sin and the brokenness of the world. Secondly, we wanted to write hopeful, you might even call them eschatological, songs—songs that are joyful, that are about this is the world that God has made, this is God’s creative work, this is how God calls us into his creative work. . . . And lastly, we wanted to write mobilization songs—songs that have some kind of an ethical component of calling people to action in some way. . . . We want to make sure the record is not too much of a downer, like all lament songs; we want to make sure that it’s not too much of a happy-clappy “Isn’t creation beautiful!”; and we also don’t want to let it just delve into being a 100 percent political action record. . . . We want to balance those things.
Wardell also talks about the group’s collaborative songwriting approach (including all the theological and editorial work that’s put in), Te Fiti’s stolen (and later, restored) heart in Disney’s Moana, personified nature in the Psalms, creation as an experiencer of the fall and redemption, the role of provocation in church, and biblical imagery he wishes they could have included on the album but had to leave out for length.
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POEM + CHORAL SETTING: “when god decided to invent” by E. E. Cummings: “Here’s a brief powerhouse of a poem from E. E. Cummings, two stanzas that draw a sharp distinction between God’s inventive, joyful creativity on the one hand, and our too-frequent turn toward violence on the other. As the mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, and elsewhere continue to reverberate, Cummings’ poem helps us feel and think about what’s at stake – and what the way forward looks like.”
SALT Project reproduces the poem, provides brief commentary, and links to a musical setting by Joshua Shank—a composition for SATB, soprano saxophone, and finger cymbals that premiered in 2005. Shank says the arc of his piece is creation-destruction-recreation. “This final chord is the creator taking control of the creation again.”
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RADIO EPISODE: “Belief in Poetry: John Donne”: John Donne (1572–1631) is one of my favorite poets, and looking back on the blog, I can’t believe I’ve not yet featured any of his poems! (I’ll have to rectify that . . .) In this BBC Radio 4 segment from March 13, poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama considers Donne’s complex faith life through his poetry. He speaks with Julie Sanders, professor of English literature and drama at Newcastle University; Mark Oakley, writer and dean of St. John’s College, Cambridge; and Michael Symmons Roberts, poet and professor of poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Sir Simon Russell Beale reads the four featured Donne poems: “Death, be not proud” and “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” from his Holy Sonnets series, “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness,” and “A Hymn to God the Father.”
Here are two of the quotes that stood out to me:
“It’s easy to think of John Donne’s life falling neatly into two parts: the worldly man, and the spiritual seeker; the lover of women, and the lover of God; Catholic, then Protestant; before Anne, and after Anne; love poet, and religious poet. But life is rarely that clear. And rather, it’s the tension between these dynamics of him that gives birth to so much of his work.”—Pádraig Ó Tuama
“There’s an assumption that a poet working in this territory is sure of their ground and knows what they’re writing about. I don’t think that’s ever true, because why would you write the poems, if that were true? You’d just bathe in your certainty! The whole act of sitting down to write a poem is not to dress up something you already know in a way that makes it an enticing package for other people to be convinced by—and if you attempted that, it’s going to fall like the deadest thing on the page. Making a poem is an exploratory process. You don’t know where it’s going to end when you start it.”—Michael Symmons Roberts
SONGWRITING CONTEST: 2021 Creation Care and Climate Justice Songwriting Contest, sponsored by The Porter’s Gate: “We are working on new worship resources celebrating God’s creation and His call to care for the created world. Over the next year we’ll be writing new songs on this subject and recording them. As part of this project, we are looking for submissions from anyone who would like to write a song or has already written a song on this subject. If you are a songwriter or composer, or if you know a songwriter who would be interested, click on this link for all the details of the contest. Songwriters are invited to submit worship songs related to caring for God’s creation, and we are offering a $500 cash prize to the winner. We’ll also record the winning piece.” No entry fee. Deadline August 30, 2021.
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CINEPOEM: “First Grade Activist” – Poem by Nic Sebastian, video by Marie Craven: This 2014 short by Australian filmmaker Marie Craven takes a poem written and read by Nic Sebastian—one of many poems made freely available for “remixing” through the now-defunct Poetry Storehouse—and sets it to moving images and music. About bullying in schools and transforming perceptions, the poem suggests concrete ways to turn a personal attribute that elicits taunts into one that’s praiseworthy, merely by reframing it. It’s an ode to red hair!
Video poetry, sometimes called “cinepoetry,” is a hybrid genre that combines the best of both art forms to make dynamic new works. To explore more, visit Moving Poems, Poetry + Video, filmpoetry.org, and the Film and Video Poetry Society, which is currently accepting submissions for its fourth annual symposium.
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NEW SONGS BY IAMSON:
IAMSON is the alias of Orlando Palmer, a Christian singer-songwriter from Richmond, Virginia. Here are two of his recent songs, each of which he invited a friend to perform.
They discuss the role of metaphor in the Bible, the unique powers of different art forms, and the ways our aesthetic choices open up and close down opportunities for formation in worship.
I so appreciate Taylor’s ecumenicism. He’s an Anglican priest in the United States but does not prescribe any one “right” way of using the arts in worship. In all his examples from across Christian traditions and even historical eras, he’s keen on exploring what motivates aesthetic choices and the benefits and drawbacks of any given choice. For instance, he compares the experiences of worshipping in a Gothic cathedral versus in a living room; neither one is inherently better than the other, but each setting will inevitably form worshippers in distinct ways. He also compares two songs centered on the idea of God as rescuer: the Gettys’ “In Christ Alone” and Hillsong’s “Oceans”; both have a similar aim but take very different approaches to reach it, and that’s OK.
Lots of great content here, folks, and a great intro to the themes in Taylor’s book.
I didn’t post an Artful Devotion this week, as I struggled to satisfactorily put together image and song for any of the readings, but I’ve now cycled through all three lectionary years on the blog, which are stored in the archives. For content on Sunday’s lectionary reading from the psalms, Psalm 133, see “When Brothers Dwell in Unity (Artful Devotion)” (featuring a Chicago mural by William Walker and a joyful new psalm setting from the Psalter Project); see also the poem “Aaron’s Beard” by Eugene Peterson.
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NEW ALBUM: Quarantine Sessions by Eric Marshall: Eric Marshall is the frontman of and songwriter for the meditative art rock band Young Oceans. During the COVID-19 quarantine he recorded eleven of the band’s old songs acoustically in his home studio—just his voice and guitar—and has released them digitally on Bandcamp. Several music artists have been making stripped-down records during this season, and I’m digging it!
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ART COMMENTARIES from ART/S AND THEOLOGY AUSTRALIA
Art/s and Theology Australia is an online publication that aims to provoke public reflection and promote research on conversations between the arts and theology, predominantly in Australian contexts. Here are a few articles from the recent past that I particularly enjoyed.
Michael Galovic (Serbian Australian, 1949–), Creation of Lights in the Heavens, n.d.
^^“Jesus Dreaming: A Theological Reaction to Michael Galovic’s Creation of Lights in the Heavens” by Merv Duffy:Creation of Lights in the Heavens by contemporary artist and iconographer Michael Galovic is an authentically Australian reading and rewriting of one of the Byzantine creation mosaics at Monreale Cathedral. Like its visual referent, it shows the Logos-Christ seated on the cosmos, hanging the sun in place (medieval artists tended to show God the Son, who is depictable, as Creator), but the gold background, used in icons to represent the eternal uncreated light of God, is replaced with dots, curves, and circles that represent the Dreamtime of Aboriginal theology, the origin of time and eternity.
Penny Dunstan, Sixteen Earth Bowls, 2018. Installed at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Merriwa, for the Festival of the Fleeces.
^^ “Sixteen Earth Bowls” by Penny Dunstan: Soil scientist and visual artist Penny Dunstan has crafted bowls out of topsoil from rehabilitated coal mines in the Hunter Valley in Warkworth, New South Wales, which she exhibits in churches, among other places. “Making earth bowls is a way of thinking about my ethical responses to soil use in a post-mining landscape,” she writes. “It is a way of thinking with my heart and not just my head. As I work with each Hunter Valley topsoil, I come to understand each as an individual, a special part of God’s creation. Each soil behaves according to its own chemical nature and historical past when I fashion it into a bowl shape. . . .
“These soils, full of tiny lives, are responsible for growing our food, making our air and storing atmospheric carbon. Our very lives as humans on the earth depend on them. By fashioning these soils into bowls and placing them in sacred places, I hope to remind us to honour the earth that we stand upon, that earth that speaks to us by pushing back at our feet.” (Note: See also Rod Pattenden’s ArtWay visual meditation on Dunstan’s work.)
Andrew Finnie (Australian, 1957–), The Body of Christ, The Tree of Life, 2014. Pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper, 78 × 182 cm.
^^“The Cross and the Tree of Life” by Rod Pattenden: “One of the pressing questions for the Church is how we see Christology being renewed in the face of climate change and the potential for the quality of life on this planet to decline,” writes art historian Rod Pattenden [previously]. “Who is Jesus for us in the midst of the profound changes that are occurring to the earth, water, and air of our world? . . .
“Andrew Finnie’s image The Body of Christ, The Tree of Life”—a large-scale ecotheological digital collage—“is an attempt to re-imagine the figure of Christ in conversation with the earth and the networks that sustain human life in all its thriving beauty. Here, the traditional figure of the cross has become entwined in the roots of the tree, a tree of life that is giving form to the variety and beauty of the natural world.”
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SONG: “Kadosh” by Wally Brath, sung by Nikki Lerner: The Kedushah is part of the Amidah, the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy. Its first verse is taken from the song of the seraphim in Isaiah 6:3: “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Kadosh means “holy.”) In this original composition for voice, piano, and string quartet, Wally Brath [previously] has combined this Hebrew exclamation from the book of the prophets with an English excerpt from the Lord’s Prayer taught by Jesus in Matthew 6:10: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” [HT: Multicultural Worship Leaders Network]
The performance captured in this video, featuring Nikki Lerner, took place at Winona Lake Grace Brethren Church in Winona Lake, Indiana, on July 11, 2020. A full list of performers is given in the YouTube description.
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CONCERT FILM: Amen! Music of the Black Church: Recorded before a live audience at the Second Baptist Church in Bloomington, Indiana, and airing April 26, this PBS special explores the rich traditions, historical significance, and meaning of black church music. Dr. Raymond Wise leads the Indiana University African American Choral Ensemble in twenty-one spirituals, hymns, and gospel songs, showing how black church music is not monolithic. He demonstrates the stylistic spectrum you can find among black church communities using a song text derived from Psalm 24:7–10 (“Lift up your heads . . .”): one performed with the European aesthetic preferred in more affluent congregations, one a classical-gospel hybrid, and one pure gospel. One thing I learned from the program is that there is a tradition of shape-note singing in the black church! (See, e.g., The Colored Sacred Harp.) [HT: Global Christian Worship]
Here’s the set list:
“We’ve Come This Far by Faith” by Albert Goodson
“Kumbaya”
“Run, Mary, Run”
“Oh Freedom”
“What a Happy Time” by J. M. Henson and J. T. Cook
“Amazing Grace” by John Newton
“Ain’t Got Time to Die” by Hall Johnson
“I’ve Been ’Buked”
“Lift Up Your Heads” by Emma Louise Ashford, arr. Lani Smith
“Lift Up Your Heads” by Clinton Hubert Utterbach
“Lift Up Your Heads, All Ye Gates” by Raymond Wise
“Glory, Glory, Hallelujah”
“Jesus on the Mainline”
“I Need Thee Every Hour” by Annie S. Hawks and Robert Lowry
“You Can’t Beat God Giving” by Doris Akers
“Come to Jesus” by E. R. Latta and J. H. Tenney
“We Shall Overcome” by Charles Tindley
“Lord, Keep Me Day by Day” by Eddie Williams
“Lord, Do It for Me” by James Cleveland
“Oh Happy Day” by Edwin Hawkins
“I’ve Got a Robe” by Raymond Wise
“Hallelujah, Praise the Lord, Amen” by Raymond Wise
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INTERVIEW: Last September The Cultivating Project interviewed Malcolm Guite [previously] on his latest poetry collection After Prayer, the poet-priest George Herbert, the life of a writer, art as faithful service, doubt and despair, his Ordinary Saints collaboration with Bruce Herman and J.A.C. Redford, his friendship with Michael Ward (author of Planet Narnia), the blessing of seasons (both earthly and liturgical), and making room for joy. The interview includes three of Guite’s poems: “Christ’s side-piercing spear,” “A Portrait of the Artist,” and “St. Augustine and the Reapers.”
Bruce Herman (American, 1953–), Malcolm Guite, 2016. Oil on panel with gold leaf, 30 × 30 in.
Below you will find a mix of annotated links to songs, interviews, articles, and art showings of interest: “The Sound of Silence” on classical guitar; an acoustic ecologist whose job is to record nature’s music; giving up books for Lent; two interfaith art exhibitions (Faces of Prayer in Vienna and To Bough and ToBend in Los Angeles); and two new folk music albums (Old Wow by Sam Lee and Civil Dawn by the Pharaoh Sisters).
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MUSIC VIDEO: “The Sound of Silence” (arr. Lawson, Trueman): Classical guitarist Miloš Karadaglić collaborated with members of the string orchestra 12 Ensemble on this instrumental rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” [HT: Philip Chircop]
This is the title track of Karadaglić’s fifth album, Sound of Silence, released last fall. To watch him perform the piece in London’s Air Studios, as filmed by Classic FM in October for Live Music Month 2019, click here.
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PODCAST EPISODE: “Silence and the Presence of Everything,”On Being interview with Gordon Hempton: “Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton collects sounds from around the world. He’s recorded inside Sitka spruce logs in the Pacific Northwest, thunder in the Kalahari Desert, and dawn breaking across six continents. An attentive listener, he says silence is an endangered species on the verge of extinction. He defines real quiet as presence—not an absence of sound but an absence of noise.”
Such a unique vocation—listening to places, preserving natural soundscapes. “I hear music coming from the land,” Hempton says. “Some of the most sublime symphonies have been hidden away in something as simple as a driftwood log.” Among his other favorite “musics” are “grass wind” (“the tone, the pitch, of the wind is a function of the length of . . . the blade of grass”) and sounds from “the most musical beach in the world,” Rialto Beach.
Earth is a solar-powered jukebox. . . . We can go to the equator, listen to the Amazon, where we have maximum sunlight, maximum solar energy. The solar panels, the leaves, are harvesting that and cycling it into the bioacoustic system. And, to my ears, that’s a little too intense. That’s a little bit too much action.
Then we can jump up into Central America, and we can still feel and hear the intense solar energy, but it’s beginning to wane.
And we notice a really big difference when we start getting into the temperate latitudes, of which I particularly enjoy recording in because it’s not just about the sound, but it’s about something that I call the “poetics” of space. . . .
“Silence is really wonderful, isn’t it?” he beams. “Even when we just let it exist, it feeds our soul.”
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ESSAY: Last year Leah Slawson gave up books for Lent. When I first read that headline, I balked. Books are so life-giving to me! But as I read on, I came to understand Slawson’s reasoning (with which I can identify), and, while I’m not fasting from reading, I admire her choice. “I put a high value on reading, but I am keenly aware that I can use it as an escape from thinking my own thoughts or from noticing my feelings. . . . Reading, for me, is a distraction from the hard work of writing, and since it is so worthy of an activity, I feel justified and redeemed. I even read and study as a way to fool myself into thinking I am practicing faith; when really, I am just reading about someone else’s spiritual practice.” [HT: Rachel A. Dawson]
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EXHIBITIONS:
>> Faces in Prayer: Photography by Katharina Heigl,Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna, December 5, 2019–March 24, 2020: A series of thirty-one intimate black-and-white photographs showing people of different faiths in prayer. To capture these shots, photographer Katharina Heigl visited churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, and other places of worship in Austria and Israel, but, important to the display, there are no labels to tell you who is praying to which god(s). That’s because Heigl wishes to emphasize the universality of the human impulse to communicate with the Divine. There are signs, however, that reproduce quotes from anonymous sources, printed in German, English, Hebrew, and Arabic, such as “Prayer is like an oasis of calm inside me. Like a tree giving me shade.” [HT: ArtWay]
Exhibition view of “Faces in Prayer: Photography by Katharina Heigl” (2019–20) at the Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna
Photograph by Katharina Heigl, from the “Faces in Prayer” series
>> To Bough and To Bend,Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, March 11–April 25, 2020: Officially launched last October, Bridge Projects is an LA exhibition space with public programs connecting art history, spirituality, living religious traditions, and contemporary art practices. Their second exhibition, To Bough and To Bend, opens Wednesday, with thirty-two participating artists.
“The Tree of Life is found in both the beginning of the Jewish Tanakh and in the last book of the Christian Scriptures. The Bodhi Tree is said to be the site of Siddhārtha Gautama’s awakening as the Buddha. Ancient Chinook prayers address God as the ‘Maker of Trees.’ As the novelist Richard Powers said, trees are rightly called ‘architecture of imagination.’ Their shade and branches have been sites of contemplation, suffering, and imagining our renewal.
“Today, trees still speak: blunt stumps communicate deforestation and charred limbs speak of Los Angeles fires started by our own hands—or our negligence. New discoveries of communicating root systems speak to a tangled web of connections just below the surface of the visible world, just as LA’s iconic—and imported—palms evoke a colonial past. In To Bough and To Bend, artists explore these ecological issues and look to both religious and contemporary art practices that help us listen to these old friends, so that we might relearn to ‘walk slowly and bow often’ and find our way back into the living world we share.”
Tal Shochat (Israeli, 1974–), Lessons in Time 3 (Yellow Apple Tree), 2016. C-prints, mounted and framed, 39 1/4 × 44 in. each. Photo courtesy of the artist and Meislin Projects.
The opening celebration on March 14 will consist of a communal poetry reading followed by a Tu B’Shevat (New Year of the Trees) ritual presentation by community organizer Michal David. Other events are: “Called to Shine: Trees in Myth, Symbol, and Art”; a live interview with artist Lucas Reiner on his Trees as Stations of the Crossproject; a talk on indigenous trees of Southern California, given by a member of the Tongva tribe; a discussion of art’s role in nature preservation; a lecture by Dr. Kimberly Ball on Yggdrasil, the tree of life in Norse mythology; “Paradise and Agony in the Garden: Sacred Trees in Italian Renaissance Art”; Dr. Duncan Ryūken Williams on the intersections of Buddhism and ecology; a bonsai demonstration; and a poetry reading and song performance by Iranian-born writer Sholeh Wolpé.
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NEW ALBUMS: Both these were released in January.
>>Old Wow by Sam Lee: An avid collector and reinterpreter of traditional songs, Britfolk artist Sam Lee is acclaimed for “breaking the boundaries between folk and contemporary music and the assumed place and way folksong is heard . . . not only inviting in a new listenership but also interrogating what the messages in these old songs hold for us today.” He studied under the Scottish storyteller and ballad singer Stanley Robertson (1940–2009) and, in addition to singing, plays the Jew’s harp and the Indian shruti box. Other instruments in his unique fusion include the klezmeresque cello, tabla, Japanese koto, ukulele, violins, and percussion.
Below are two music videos from his latest album, Old Wow. The first is “Lay This Body Down,” a song about death; in the choreographed video, Lee is tugged and caressed by a gaggle of deceased souls, who at the end enfold him in the ground. “The Moon Shines Bright,” on the other hand, which features Elizabeth Fraser, is about life: its call (fitting for Lent) is to “Rise, arise, wake thee, arise / Life, she is calling thee / For it might be the mothering of your sweet soul / If you open your eyes and see.” I’ve heard many different iterations of this song, which usually appears on Advent/Christmas albums with verses about the Nativity, Crucifixion, etc., but this adaptation was gifted to Lee by an elderly Gypsy woman named Freda Black and is absent of overt Christological references.
>> Civil Dawn by the Pharaoh Sisters: The Pharaoh Sisters is a folk outfit from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, whose debut album has arrived! Influenced by mountain, old-time, and gospel traditions, the band consists of Austin Pfeiffer on acoustic guitar and lead vocals, Jared Meyer on acoustic guitar and backing vocals, Kevin Beck on lap steel guitar, and John Daniel Ray on upright bass. “Their music blends the cowboy sensibilities of Western-native frontman and lyricist Austin Pfeiffer with the Appalachian traditions of dark imagery and poignant guitars from their current home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.”
The biblical narrative is deeply embedded in the album, with many sideways references to specific scriptures. Topography is used symbolically throughout—fissures, canyons, mountains—and helps establish the central metaphor of Jesus as a pioneer, opening up a new frontier for us, leading us through the wilderness into the land of promise.
The album’s title, Civil Dawn, is a scientific term referring to when the center of the sun is six degrees below the horizon in the morning—in other words, the moment before the sun rises. The first song, which muses on the paradoxical character of Jesus, ends with a yearning for “Healing wings / Righteous sun,” a subtle nod to Malachi 4:2. That leads into “Awake, my soul, to the sun,” a prayer that we would incline ourselves toward the Light that’s already shining. As the journey continues, there’s darkness, dryness, a feeling of lostness and thirst. But we are not abandoned by our co-traveler, who is our light, our rest and refreshment, our way-maker. The last song, “Homecoming,” celebrates the “pioneer man with sun-scorched hands” who “guides on a trail he’s blazed”—an evocative image, which makes me think of Christ’s glorious wounds (in many traditional religious paintings, the nail prints emit light), but also, in light of the whole record, Isaiah 58:11: “The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.”
The Breath and the Clay Artists (speakers/workshop leaders/Q&A panel members): John Mark McMillan, Stephen Roach, Jason Upton, Cageless Birds, Joel McKerrow, Josh Riebock, Stephen Roach, Mykell Wilson, Ray Hughes, Gemma Bender, Taylor Johnson, Eastlyn and Joshua, Vesper Stamper, Turtledoves, Avril Ward Date: March 22–25, 2018 Location: Awake Church, Winston-Salem, North Carolina Cost: $100 (but see pricing details for other options; some events free to public) Description: “The Breath & the Clay is a creative arts gathering exploring the intersections of faith, art & culture. The weekend event includes times of worship, keynote speakers, performances, and a curated art gallery hosted by CIVA. Hands-on workshops [poetry, choreography, songwriting, painting, photography], a private luncheon and an after-party are available for additional purchase.” If you’re not able to attend, you should at least check out their Makers & Mystics podcast, which is in its third season.
Urban Doxology Songwriting Internship (PAID) Application deadline: April 15, 2018 Dates of internship: June 3–July 30, 2018 Location: East End Fellowship, Richmond, Virginia Description: “The Urban Doxology Songwriting Internship is an intensive eight-week leadership development program offered in partnership by Arrabon and East End Fellowship. Interns participate in a learning experience of the following subjects: (1) biblical theology and exposition (2) worship studies with a focus on multicultural worship (3) race, class and culture (4) songwriting and (5) community engagement. Interns will spend the remainder of their time writing songs, rehearsing music, and planning worship for a congregation in the urban context.”
“Telling Stories: A Conference of Faith and Art” Speakers: Natalie Diaz, Barbara Brown Taylor, Esra Akin-Kivanç, Arthur Skinner, Alex Harris, Herbert Murphy, Peter Meinke Date: April 19–22, 2018 Organizers: Eckerd College, Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church, NEXT Church, Image journal Location: Eckerd College, Saint Petersburg, Florida Cost: Free Description: “With the theme of ‘Telling Stories’ as guide, this conference will employ discussions, poetry readings, presentations, visual arts, and theater to examine art’s power to confront current narratives, allow people to tell their own stories, and explore new ways of talking about God, faith, and social responsibility. . . . Designed for anyone interested in the imaginative and prophetic intersection of faith and arts.”
Call for Creation-Care Worship Materials Submission deadline: April 30, 2018 Sponsor: Christian Reformed Church Description: The Climate Witness Project and other CRC ministries are partnering to crowdsource creative worship resources that “celebrate and honor God’s creation while addressing creation-care challenges, such as climate change, facing the world.” Songs, prayers, images, videos, sermon notes, litanies, and other elements are all invited for submission and will be collated and published online in fall 2018. By submitting your work, you agree to the terms of a CC BY-NC license.
Call for Papers on US Immigration and the Arts Submission deadline: May 1, 2018 (abstract) Organization:Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies Description: SARTS “seeks presentations by scholars, teachers, pastors, or artists that explore creative/artistic engagements with and/or responses to the reality of immigration in the United States. Topics include but are not limited to the perspectives of the various groups of people on the move, crossing and policing borders, religious landscapes of immigration, immigration and the imagination, place making, political advocacy, and activism. All forms of artistic expression are welcome.”
Hymn Society Songwriting Contest Submission deadline: May 15, 2018 Sponsor: The Hymn Society Prize: $500 Description: As part of the Hymn Society’s ongoing commitment to the enrichment of congregational song, the executive committee has announced a search for a new short-form song suitable for congregational singing. (Both text and tune must be original.) In addition to receiving prize money, the winning entry will premiere July 15–19, 2018, at the society’s conference in St. Louis, Missouri, and be published in the Autumn 2018 issue of The Hymn.
“Afterlives of Biblical Women in Art, Literature, and Culture”(summer course) Instructor: Amanda Russell-Jones Date: July 2–13, 2018 Institution: Regent College, Vancouver Cost: Starting at Can$700 Description: The arts have profoundly shaped our interpretation of biblical characters, whether we realize it or not. In this graduate-level course, one of the learning objectives is to be able to “discuss the significance of a variety of biblical women, differentiating between the content of the biblical text and the ways later additions and interpretations changed how the woman was viewed.” How has the mirror held up to women like Eve, Bathsheba, Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, etc., made the biblical texts clearer, and how has it distorted them? You do not have to be a currently enrolled college student to register.
Glen Workshop Faculty: Chigozie Obioma, Scott Cairns, Lauren Winner, Marianne Lettieri, Gina Franco, Lee Isaac Chung, Over the Rhine, Ned Bustard, Malcolm Guite Date: July 29–August 5, 2018 Location: St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico Organizer: Image Cost: Starting at $1,150 (scholarships available) Description: “Situated in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Glen Workshop is equal parts creative workshop, arts festival, and spiritual retreat. The Glen’s arresting natural environment is contrasted by its casual and inviting crowd of artists, writers, musicians, art appreciators, and spiritual wayfarers of all stripes.” Workshops are offered on spiritual writing, songwriting, fiction writing, poetry writing, poetry reading, mixed-media art, relief printing, and filmmaking. The faculty lineup is phenomenal! And I appreciate the all-inclusive package option.
Art & Theology 