Tag: Matthew Milliner

Roundup: Ascension Sunday, Mother God, and more

Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

SUMMER COURSES: Arts at Regent: Regent College in Vancouver is offering eight one- or two-week in-person courses on its arts track this summer, including “After Disenchantment” with Joy Marie Clarkson (reading list includes Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, etc.), “The Puritan Literary Imagination” (on Paradise Lost and Pilgrim’s Progress) with Johanna Harris, and “The Arts, Empathy, and Spiritual Formation” with Mary McCampbell. Several years ago I took a Regent summer course on worship and the arts and really enjoyed it!

+++

BIBLICAL COMMENTARY: “Ascension Sunday (Year A): Luke 24:44-53 and Acts 1:1-11” by SALT Project: This Sunday marks the risen Jesus’s departure after forty days of dwelling with the community of disciples. While SALT Project’s commentary doesn’t plumb all the meaning of the Ascension, I was struck by its pointing out of the significance of the Mount of Olives (in light of Zechariah’s prophecy and the “choreography” of Palm Sunday) and the resonances with Elijah’s ascent, particularly with Christ’s passing on his mantle to the church.

+++

ASCENSION HYMN: “Alleluia, Sing to Jesus” by William Chatterton Dix, 1866

>> Music by Rowland Hugh Prichard, 1830: The hymn is often paired with the public-domain Welsh tune HYFRYDOL (which I know best from its association with “Jesus, What a Friend for Sinners”). It’s sung here by Ben Lashey and Chris Joyner:

>> Music by Rebecca Almazar and Brian Gurney, 2020: I really love this new tune that Almazar and Gurney wrote for the hymn while they were at New City Fellowship in Manassas, Virginia, which was released on the church’s EP A Liturgy. Gurney is now the director of contemporary worship at The Falls Church Anglican in Falls Church, Virginia. The song is not yet available on CCLI, but in the meantime, he has granted permission for license-free church use; here are the chords.

+++

CALL FOR ENTRIES: 2023 Sacred Art Competition and Exhibition: “Seeking the finest contemporary sacred art for an online juried exhibition hosted by the Catholic Art Institute, with a world-wide audience and the opportunity to sell work, be featured on the Catholic Art Institute website.” The top prize is $2,500. The deadline for submission is November 6, 2023. From what I can tell, participants need not be Catholic, but the artwork(s) should be suitable for devotional and/or liturgical use by Catholics.

+++

PODCAST EPISODE: “Loving Christ Our Mother with Julian of Norwich,” Old Books with Grace, May 17, 2023: This month marks the 650th anniversary of the anchorite Julian of Norwich’s visionary encounter with God, which she recorded in her Showings, the earliest surviving work of literature in English by a woman. In this twenty-minute episode of her podcast, medievalist Grace Hamman, author of the forthcoming Jesus Through Medieval Eyes: Beholding Christ with the Artists, Mystics, and Theologians of the Middle Ages, introduces us to Julian, dwelling especially on one of Julian’s favorite metaphors: that of Christ as mother.

In the fourteenth century, Hamman says, fathers generally loved their children but were less involved in the day-to-day tasks of caring for their physical and emotional needs, whereas mothers were deeply present. Julian wrote about how Christ gave birth to his children on the bed of the cross, how he nurses them from his side, and how he acutely hears and responds to their individual cries. This podcast episode is an excellent summation of a theological idea that may sound odd and unorthodox at first but that is in fact biblically derived, appearing throughout church history, and that grants us fuller insight into who Christ is.

(Related post: “Our Sweet, Travailing Mother Christ”)

+++

BOOK: Mother God by Teresa Kim Pecinovsky, illustrated by Khoa Le: Dovetailing with Hamman’s recent podcast episode is this beautifully unique children’s book that came out last year from Beaming Books. “With lyrical, rhyming text and exquisite illustrations, Mother God introduces readers to a dozen images of God inspired by feminine descriptions from Scripture. Children and adults alike will be in awe of the God who made them as they come to know her as a creative seamstress, generous baker, fierce mother bear, protective mother hen, strong woman in labor, nurturing nursing mother, wise grandmother, and comforting singer of lullabies. This gorgeous picture book welcomes children into a fuller, more diverse understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God.” Born in South Korea, raised in Iowa, and living in Texas, author Teresa Kim Pecinovsky (MDiv, MEd) (pictured below) is a hospice chaplain ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a former elementary school teacher. Khoa Le is an artist from Vietnam.

Mother God
Illustration by Khoa Le

Some traditionalists will no doubt have a visceral reaction against the cover and concept—“God reveals himself as Father, not Mother!” they’ll say, or “The Bible uses only masculine pronouns for God”—but it’s important to remember that God is nongendered, although God does contain both the masculine and the feminine (see, e.g., Gen. 1:27). “Father” is a metaphor, same as “mother.” God became incarnate as a male, Jesus, but as Hamman shows (see previous roundup item), Jesus also exhibited some qualities traditionally associated with women and mothers in particular, and therefore we can speak metaphorically of Christ as mother, as we can, too, of the First Person of the Trinity. Having an academic background in literature, I’m very comfortable with (and enthralled by!) metaphor, but I can understand, lamentably, how it trips some people up.

+++

ARTICLE: “Waking Ancient Seeds: Why the Middle Ages Matter” by Matthew J. Milliner, Comment, May 10, 2023: “For the medievals, Jesus is the Rosetta stone of cosmic meaning, with whom all things are aglow in the polyphonic resonance of truth, and without whom the world hurdles into centrifugal disconnection,” writes Matt Milliner, a theologically trained professor of art history at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois. “It is our world that has been flattened, lacking the full-orbed splendour of medieval significance and depth.” In this article he contrasts the symbolism and sense of wonder and reverence of the Middle Ages with the deficits of the present, identifying several, sometimes unlikely places in which these “ancient seeds” are sprouting again.

Roundup: Light in Nativity and Transfiguration icons, plus more art and song

Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

LECTURE: “Light in Sacred Space: Light from the Cave” by Matthew J. Milliner and Alexei Lidov, December 19, 2019, Bridge Projects, Los Angeles: This double lecture about the role of light in Christian spirituality and theology was organized to coincide with the premiere of 10 Columns, an immersive light installation by Phillip K. Smith III that Bridge Projects commissioned for their inaugural exhibition.

While the Light & Space movement was born in Southern California in the 1960s, in many ways it participates in a much longer history of artists in dialogue with the phenomena of light. This presentation by two art historians, Matthew Milliner and Alexei Lidov, will begin with Milliner exploring the unexpected resonance of Phillip K. Smith III’s work with Byzantine and Gothic traditions. Lidov will then expand on these ideas with his scholarship in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and its long history of engaging light and mysticism. What kinds of insights might come when Light and Space artists, including Phillip K. Smith III, are put in conversation with ancient Orthodox Christian concepts of the nativity and uncreated light? [source]

Milliner speaks for the first forty minutes, discussing Nativity and Transfiguration icons and their correlatives in the West and making, as always, fascinating connections between art of the past and present. For example, he overlays Olafur Eliasson’s Ephemeral Afterimage Star (2008) on Rublev’s Transfiguration icon (19:19), and Ann Veronica Janssens’s Yellow Rose on an Adoration of the Magi illumination from a fifteenth-century book of hours at the Getty (26:32). He also introduced me to a fascinating medieval manuscript illumination from Germany (which he in turn learned about through Solrunn Nes) that combines the light of Bethlehem and Tabor—two Gospel scenes in one. Don’t miss the quote by Gregory of Nazianzus.

Janssens, Ann Veronica_Yellow Rose
Ann Veronica Janssens (Belgian, 1956–), Yellow Rose, 2007. Projectors, dichroic filters, and artificial mist, dimensions variable (min. 360 cm diameter, min. 250 cm depth). Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany. Photo: Philippe De Gobert.
Nativity-Transfiguration (Ottonian MS)
The Nativity and the Transfiguration, from an Ottonian Gospel-book made in Cologne, 1025–50. Bamberg State Library, Msc.Bibl.94, fol. 155r.

Combining art history and theology (he has advanced degrees in both), Milliner’s talk is organized as follows:

  1. Thessaloniki | Gregory Palamas (d. 1337)
  2. Constantinople | Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (d. ca. 500)
  3. Paris | Abbot Suger (d. 1151)
  4. Los Angeles | Phillip K. Smith III (b. 1972)

+++

ART VIDEOS:

>> “A 60-second introduction to ‘The Nativity at Night’”: One of my favorite Nativity paintings! By fifteenth-century Dutch artist Geertgen tot Sint Jans, a lay brother in the religious order of St. John. In this video from the National Gallery in London, a camera scans over the painting as an atmospheric soundscape plays and captions guide us in looking at the details.

Geertgen tot Sint Jins_The Nativity at Night
Geertgen tot Sint Jans (Dutch, ca. 1455/65–ca. 1485/95), The Nativity at Night, ca. 1490. Oil on oak, 34 × 25.3 cm. National Gallery, London.

>> “Mother and Child Commission”: In this twelve-minute “making of” video, filmmaker Nick Clarke talks to artist Nicholas Mynheer over the first half of 2020, tracing his progress on the life-size Mother and Child sculpture that was commissioned by the Community of St Mary the Virgin, Wantage, an Anglican convent in Oxfordshire. I was struck by, from the looks of it, the physical demands of the sculpting process—the strength and endurance required to chip away daily at blocks of stone outside in winter, until they yield the shape you desire, then the logistics of attaching the blocks with steel, which weigh nearly a ton collectively, and disassembling, transporting, and reassembling them for installation. I was also interested to hear Mynheer discuss the expressive capabilities of English limestone—how you can convey emotional and sartorial subtleties, for example, through the precise angling of the chisel.

Mynheer, Nicholas_Mother and Child (Wantage)
Nicholas Mynheer (British, 1958–), Mother and Child, 2020–21. English limestone, height 230 cm.

Mother and Child was installed in the outdoor reception area of St Mary’s on April 12, 2021; you can watch a video of the installation here. “In very, apparently, simplified form, there is so much tenderness, energy, and something new,” says Sister Stella, the sister in charge, about the sculpture. “Jesus isn’t going to be held back. Her son’s going to go places.”

To learn more about Nicholas Mynheer, visit his website, https://www.mynheer-art.co.uk/. You can also read the artist profile I wrote on him for Transpositions in 2017.

+++

SONGS:

>> “Corazón Pesebre” (Heart Manger) by Rescate: A follower of the blog introduced me to this Christmas song from Argentina, and I dig it! Released as a single in 2017, it’s about turning our hearts into a manger to receive Christ. Read the Spanish lyrics in the YouTube video description.

The song is by the highly popular Argentinian Christian rock band Rescate, active from 1987 to 2020. Their lead singer and main songwriter, Ulises Eyherabide, died of cancer in July.

>> “Hallelujah, What a Savior!” (Christmas Version), performed by Providence Church, Austin, Texas: In 2012 Austin Stone Worship songwriters Aaron Ivey, Halim Suh, and Matt Carter rewrote the lyrics to Philip P. Bliss’s classic “Hallelujah, What a Savior!” to make them more Christmas-centered and added a new refrain; their version was released that year on A Day of Glory (Songs for Christmas). Here the song is performed by another Austin worship team—Jordan Hurst, Jaleesa McCreary, and Brian Douglas Phillips from Providence Church—for a virtual worship service on November 29, 2020. Instead of using the Austin Stone refrain, they quote Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” between verses.

Roundup: Kenyan Annunciation; Jesus in utero; the politics of the Magnificat; and more

Victoria Emily Jones5 Comments

Many Catholics and Orthodox decry that Protestants really only ever talk about Mary during Christmas. While she does get some extra attention here on the blog in December, I also try to talk about her throughout the year, from the feasts of the Annunciation (March 25) and the Visitation (May 31) to her witness during Holy Week and Pentecost and her being such an important figure in Jesus’s life and exemplary for our own. Here’s a new Marian roundup, plus at the bottom a Christmas gift idea involving a product I helped create. 🙂

VISUAL MEDITATIONS:

>> “Wondrous” by Paul Simpson Duke, Seeing the Sacred: In 2019, the Rev. Drs. Paul and Stacey Simpson Duke, co-pastors of First Baptist Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ran an Annunciation art series on their blog, meditating on one artwork on the subject per day for twenty-five days. I commend the whole series, but I was particularly compelled by Day 13, which centers on a terracotta sculpture made by the late Kenyan artist Rosemary Namuli Karuga when she was a student at Makerere College Art School in Uganda. Paul Duke considers especially the mixture of sorrow and awe expressed in the figure’s face.

Karuga, Rosemary Namuli_Mary
Rosemary Namuli Karuga (Kenyan, 1928–2021), Mary, ca. 1950. Terracotta. This image is Plate 4 in the book Christian Art in Africa and Asia by Arno Lehmann.

>> “Pregnant with God” by Victoria Emily Jones, ArtWay: For the first Sunday of Advent, I wrote about the painting Blue Madonna by Scottish Catholic artist Michael Felix Gilfedder, which shows the Christ child developing inside Mary’s womb. Pregnancy has always been an image I’ve carried with me during Advent, as it embodies the expectancy characteristic of the season—the growth of new life, a hidden fullness, about to come forth.

Gilfedder, Michael Felix_Blue Madonna
Michael Felix Gilfedder (Scottish, 1948–), Blue Madonna (Mary, Mother of God), 1987. Oil and tempera on wood with gesso relief, 25 1/4 × 13 in. (64 × 33 cm). Private collection, London. [prints for sale]

+++

PODCAST EPISODES: Both of the following come from For the Life of the World, the podcast of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Released back-to-back last December.

>> “Mary Theotokos: Her Bright Sorrow, Her Suffering Faith, and Her Compassion” with Frederica Mathewes-Green: Frederica Mathewes-Green is an American author and speaker, chiefly on topics related to Eastern Orthodox belief and practice. Here she discusses the Orthodox reverence for Mary; the scriptural account of her life; Mary as the mother of us all; the Protevangelium of James, which provides legendary material about Mary’s upbringing and betrothal; the ancient prayer “Sub tuum praesidium” (“Under Your Compassion”) from 250 CE, the earliest known appearance of the title “Theotokos”; and Mary’s role as intercessor. The latter point is something that Protestants like me are wary of—praying through saints who have passed on is not something I practice—but the way Mathewes-Green explains it is, just as we would ask fellow believers on earth to pray for us, why shouldn’t we also ask our friends in heaven to do the same, if we truly believe that they are alive and that we are in communion with them (as we confess in the Apostles’ Creed)?

Besides explicating several Marian doctrines, Mathewes-Green also speaks of Mary as an ordinary human being with an extraordinary call. With tenderness, she considers Mary’s experiences and emotions at different life stages: first as a perplexed young woman who is taken aback by Gabriel’s announcement but ultimately responds with humility and magnanimity, then as a parent who raises a child and later witnesses his violent death.

For more from Mathewes-Green on the topic, see her book Mary as the Early Christians Knew Her: The Mother of Jesus in Three Ancient Texts.

>> “A Womb More Spacious Than Stars: How Mary’s Beauty and Presence Upends the Patriarchy and Stabilizes Christian Spirituality” with Matthew J. Milliner: Matthew Milliner, an art history professor at Wheaton College and the author of Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon, is a Protestant who wants to see other Protestants embrace a more robust doctrine of Mary as Theotokos, “Mother of God,” and develop a keener sense of her ecclesial presence. In this hour-long conversation he discusses Mary as person and as symbol; the need for “hermeneutical adventurousness anchored in the revelation of God in Christ”; how icons work, and particularly how Marian icons are spiritually formative; how to read a Nativity icon; the feminist objection to Mary; how Mary upends the ancient pagan goddess culture; and how we all must be Marian if we are to be orthodox Christians.

I’ve previously featured two other talks by Milliner on Mary: “The Art of Advent” and “Blessed Art Thou.”

+++

VIDEO: “Magnificat” by SALT Project: This short film features a reading of the Magnificat in Spanish, its words fleshed out in contemporary images. For the same video but in English, see here.

+++

ARTICLE: “The Political Is Personal: Mary as a Parent and Prophet of Righteousness” by Erin Dufault-Hunter, Fuller Magazine: What does the New Testament mean by “righteousness” (dikē)? Is it personal piety, or social justice? This article by Christian ethics professor Erin Dufault-Hunter examines how Mary upholds both connotations of the word. “Perhaps more than anyone else, Mary displays for us how saying yes to the kingdom, and its unlikely king, necessarily involves the personal but also reorients our social and political allegiances,” Dufault-Hunter writes. “Intimacy with God necessarily entails a political orientation, bringing or solidifying a way of seeing power and position.” Debunking the claim that Jesus’s coming was not political, Dufault-Hunter considers Mary’s Magnificat as well as other elements of the Christmas story—like the title “Son of God,” the word “gospel,” and the angels’ potentially treasonous news to the shepherds—showing how the good news of Christ is both personal and political.

+++

The Daily Prayer Project is running a special Christmas gift offer that, for $50, includes a physical and digital copy of our hot-off-the-press Christmas–Epiphany prayer periodical (covering December 25 through February 21) and two hand-thrown, dishwasher-safe mugs with a raised medallion of our labyrinth-inspired logo and glazes that map onto our morning and evening prayer colors. Packages ship early next week, so get your order in soon! There are also yearly subscription options, individual or communal, on the website.

In addition to working as a copyeditor and proofreader for the DPP, I also curate the art for the Gallery section, which is expanded in this edition to eight pieces—in this case, Nativities from around the world, each accompanied by a short reflection. The cover image is Morning Star by the Japanese Christian artist Hiroshi Tabata (1929–2014).

Roundup: Frederick Buechner on the arts, contemporary art as spiritual discipline, and more

Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: September 2022 by Victoria Emily Jones: This month’s thirty-song lineup includes a tango, a Pentecostal praise song, a playful setting of the Heidelberg Catechism Q&A number one, an Americana lament for hard times, a Negro spiritual on sax, Christina Rossetti, guitar evangelist Mother McCollum with a unique Jesus metaphor (!), a 9/11-inspired interfaith prayer that I will write about in a separate post, and songs in Turkish (“Kutsal, Kutsal, Kutsal Allah” = Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God) and Sepedi (“Modimo re boka wena” = God, we praise you).

+++

LECTURE (AUDIO): “God’s Thumbprint” by Frederick Buechner: Ordained minister and Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–nominated author Frederick Buechner died August 15 at age ninety-six. He was a wonderful writer (of both fiction and spiritual nonfiction) and preacher, and I hear him quoted all the time. He once summed up the theme of all his work as “Listen to your life.”

In 1992 Buechner spoke for the biennial Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, about how “art and religion are twin expressions of the human spirit.” Discussing poetry, painting, and music, he shows how the arts help us to pay attention. Listen to the talk, “God’s Thumbprint,” on FFW’s Rewrite Radio podcast. It is an expansion of the “Art” entry Buechner wrote in his book Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (1988); read the full excerpt here.

Rembrandt_Old Woman Praying
Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669), Old Woman Praying, 1629–30. Oil on gilded copper, 15.5 × 12.2 cm. Residenzgalerie Salzburg, Austria. This is one of the many careworn, lived-in elderly faces Rembrandt painted.

+++

LECTURE (VIDEO): “Difficult Beauty: Contemporary Art as Spiritual Discipline” by James K. A. Smith: In its content selection and development, the arts quarterly Image, says editor in chief James K. A. Smith, resists both nostalgia (old is better) and progressivism (new is better), charting a third way that he calls “archaic avant-garde.” The journal’s focus is on contemporary art, but contemporary art funded by tradition. Most of the writers and artists they feature see the tradition of religious art as a gift and a launchpad.

In this lunchtime Zoom talk from May 19, 2021, Smith considers why contemporary art so often feels alienating. He focuses on painting, giving a brief history of the onset of modernism in that medium, starting with the impact of photography, which pushed painters beyond the representation of objective reality. He shares compelling quotes by art critic Peter Schjeldahl and philosopher John Carvalho, about how we look and when thinking happens. Smith discusses the need for humility—to be comfortable with the not-knowing, to surrender our desire for mastery and control (i.e., demanding that paintings explain themselves).

What if the art that first alienates us is the art that might also stretch us? Or what if the literature that’s intimidating might also be the literature that has the possibility to kind of break us open in new ways, open us up to others, and even open us up to God? What if the difficulty of contemporary art is a virtue? And what if experiencing that difficulty is actually what we need? (12:42)

Daniel Domig (Canadian/Austrian, 1983–), Prayer Invites Chaos, 2019. Oil on mixed fibers, 75 × 59 in. [artist’s website]

The last twenty minutes consists of Q&A and addresses icons, art as propaganda, whether and how to engage art that comes out of a place of despair, and more.

I admit that I find much of contemporary art difficult, often unpleasantly so. A few readers have requested that I feature more abstract art, but I struggle to know how to talk about it. But I do want to learn. Image helps me do that.

+++

ESSAY: “Venice Undone” by Matthew J. Milliner: A core publication of Cardus, Comment magazine is committed to “the difficult work of being faithfully present in culture.” This summer they published an essay by art historian Matthew Milliner reflecting on the Anish Kapoor and Anselm Kiefer exhibitions at the 59th Venice Biennale, one of the art world’s largest and most significant recurring events.

Milliner discusses one of Kapoor’s convex sculptures in Vantablack—a nanotech coating so dark that it absorbs 99.8 percent of visible light—which, in its staging at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, dialogues with three Marian icons and a ceiling painting of God the Father; Sky Mirror in the Accademia courtyard (see also Jonathan A. Anderson’s Instagram post on this piece); Shooting into the Corner; and The Healing of St. Thomas.

Photo by Matthew Milliner
At the 59th Venice Biennale, the Infant Christ from Paolo Veneziano’s Madonna and Child Enthroned (1320s) seems to bless one of Anish Kapoor’s “voids,” a black-painted work that appears flat when viewed head-on but whose convexity becomes apparent when viewed from the side. Photo: Matthew J. Milliner.

In part 2 of the essay, Milliner considers how the Kiefer show at the Doge’s Palace critiques Venice’s history of military conquest, replacing Titian’s The Conquest of Zara (1584) with an image of an empty tomb that evokes Jesus’s conquest over death. Apocalyptic themes have long been noted in Kiefer’s work; Milliner sees in particular traces of St. Paul and an interrogation of historic Venice’s bombastic displays of wealth and splendor, which are not lasting. And of course there’s the Jacob’s ladder motif. For a silent video tour of the exhibition, see here.

Kiefer, Anselm_Venice Biennale 2022
Anselm Kiefer (German, 1945–), These writings, when burned, will finally give some light, site-specific exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022. Sala dello Scrutinio, Palazzo Ducale, Venice. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Prompted in part by their use of darkness, Kapoor and Kiefer have been read by some scholars through a lens of despair, but Milliner looks with eyes of hope and sees plenitude and light.

+++

SONG: “Jordan” by Jana Horn: One of Art & Theology’s subscribers sent this to me, and I’m not sure what to make of it, but I definitely find it intriguing, if a bit unsettling. A song from Jana Horn’s debut solo album, Optimism (2022), which Pitchfork calls “cryptic, bewildering, and daringly simple.” “Jordan” is full of veiled biblical allusions and touches on themes of pilgrimage, belief, destruction, incarnation, and burden bearing. I share it here in the spirit of Jamie Smith’s talk above, about not needing to nail down meaning in an artwork—even though I can’t help but ask, “Just who are the two dialogue partners?!” (God the Son and God the Father?)

Horn is a singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas, and a fiction-writing graduate student at the University of Virginia–Charlottesville.

7 Hours of Interviews on Religion and the Arts

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

Created, written, and hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Closer To Truth is a public television series that explores fundamental questions relating to the cosmos, consciousness, religion, and the search for ultimate reality and purpose. The program boasts a robust website featuring over four thousand video interviews with scientists, philosophers, theologians, artists, and other scholars and practitioners.

I am particularly interested in the seven hours’ worth of interviews on art and religion/God that fall under the “Art Seeking Understanding” rubric. They are separated into three- to twelve-minute segments spread across these eight topical series:

  • Art and the Philosophy of Religion: “Can art inform topics in philosophy of religion? Can the existence and varieties of art address or affect theological questions about God, faith, belief, worship?”
  • Arguing God from the Arts?: “Is it possible to infer something of the nonphysical, divine existence of God from the physical, human existence of art? Can one argue for God from art?”
  • Can the Arts Reveal God’s Traits?: “If God is the Creator of human beings and art is a feature of human sentience, then can examining the arts help discern characteristics of God? Can one infer from various aspects of art various traits of God?”
  • Arts and Religious Experience: “What is the relationship between experiencing art and experiencing God? Can the arts generate or trigger religious experience? If so, can it be validated?”
  • Arts and Religious Belief: “Is there a relationship between diverse arts and belief in God? Can the arts express or encourage religious belief? If so, can it be validated?” (*This is my favorite.)
  • Arts and Religious Practice (Liturgy): “Why are the arts so deeply embedded in religious settings and services? How do the arts work in religious spaces and activities? What are differences among the arts, say music and painting, in the liturgy?” (*This is my second favorite!)
  • Arts and Religious Reality: “Art is deeply involved in the practice of religion, embedded in the rituals and liturgy of almost every religion. But how could the ubiquity of the arts in religion affect whether or not religion is real?”
  • Co-Evolution of Art and Religion: “Did art and religion co-evolve in parallel as archeology and anthropology suggest, and if so, what would be the significance? What do art and religion have in common that could enable their common, co-temporal development?”
Closer to Truth screen cap

Interviewees include Nicholas Wolterstorff, Matthew Milliner, Jonathan A. Anderson, Judith Wolfe, Aaron Rosen, Alfonse Borysewicz, John Witvliet, and others. I’m disappointed by the lack of diversity among interviewees—the program is very heavy on white male Christians—but I am nevertheless grateful for the wisdom these individuals share, and for the efforts of the Closer To Truth team to coax it out, capture it onscreen, and present it freely to the public.

Here are a few interviews I’ll call your attention to:

These videos and many more can also be found on Closer To Truth’s YouTube channel.

Roundup: Carrying a boulder, toppling statues, art and prayer retreat, and more

Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

NEW SONG: “Trust in You” by Antoine Bradford IV: Alternative soul artist Antoine Bradford released the original song “Trust in You” on April 21, and then came this acoustic version, which simultaneously moves me and stills me! Another single, “How Many Times,” came out yesterday, and a full-length album is on its way, on the Humble Beast label.

+++

PODCAST EPISODES

“Andre Henry on Systemic Racism,” Conversing (Fuller Studio), May 7, 2020: Writer, musical artist, speaker, and activist Andre Henry sits down with Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Theological Seminary (where Henry earned a master’s in 2016), to share his personal journey of learning about systemic racism and some of the ways he’s exposing and pushing against it. He talks about growing up the son of Jamaican immigrants in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and the early influence of reggae music; his moving to New York City during the age of stop-and-frisk to take a job as a worship leader; and his time at Fuller in California, where, in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, he shifted from the perspective of “Black people are treated differently in the US” to “The US is a fundamentally racist society.”

Along the way, he discusses “whiteness” as an invention made to subjugate other people, not letting the news cycle dictate when you talk about racism, his study of social movement theory and the post-Shoah theologians, his realization that black people are not powerless, his writing the songs “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way” and “How Long,” the failure of many (white) church ministers to minister to black congregants, the resistance he met while interviewing for pastoral positions, the religious doubts that surfaced after repeatedly hearing from Christian friends that “Racism isn’t a priority for God” and that social activism distracts from the gospel, and more.

I particularly appreciated hearing Henry describe, starting at 28:36, an art piece he performed over the course of six months in 2016, in which he pulled around a hundred-pound boulder in a wagon everywhere he went—work, classes, dinners, church, grocery store, etc. The boulder was painted white and had words like “Mass incarceration,” “police brutality,” and “white fragility” written on it. Labberton, who was one of the many witnesses of this performance, interprets its intent as “I’m trying to externalize a burden that is the burden that I walk with every day, and I want you to see it for what it actually is, and the weightiness of it.” “Stunning,” “profound,” “a significant liturgical act,” and “a Jeremiah kind of an enactment” are some of the ways Labberton describes Henry’s boulder-carrying, the latter referring to the biblical prophet’s outrageous symbolic acts, such as the retrieval of soiled, tattered underwear, the breaking of a clay jug, and the wearing of an oxen yoke. (As a side note, one of my all-time favorite articles from the esteemed Image journal is “The Avant-Garde and Sacred Discontent: Contemporary Performance Artists Meet Ancient Jewish Prophets” by Wayne Roosa.)

Andre Henry carrying a boulder

To learn more about Andre Henry, visit his website, http://andrehenry.co/, where you can find his Hope and Hard Pills podcast, blog, and music and sign up for his newsletter. See also his self-introduction on Twitter and the short video Fuller Studio made with him in 2016, “Culture Care and Music.”

“Why Christians Have a Reputation for Smashing Statues,” Quick to Listen, interview with Matthew Milliner, July 8, 2020: Following the killing of George Floyd in May, protesters have torn down or vandalized dozens of statues connected to the Confederacy and to other controversial historical figures like Christopher Columbus. Matthew Milliner, associate professor of art history at Wheaton College, joins Christianity Today’s global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen “to discuss how much earlier Christian battles over statues echo today’s fights, what Christians have learned that might help us better understand the call to remove statues today, and whether we should even be creating memorials and monuments in the first place.”

Milliner references the Emancipation Memorial and Mary McLeod Bethune statue in DC’s Lincoln Park; the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama [previously]; Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial; the St. Augustine Foot Soldiers Monument; and UNC–Chapel Hill’s Silent Sam monument to the Confederacy and lesser-known Unsung Founders Memorial. After the interview he created a chart titled “What to Do with Monuments,” providing five options and citing historical analogues as well as contemporary examples in the US and internationally.

+++

OBITUARY: “Ennio Morricone, Oscar-Winning Composer of Film Scores, Dies at 91”: Regarded as one of the most influential film composers of all time, Ennio Morricone wrote over four hundred scores for cinema and television, as well as over a hundred classical works. I know him best for the soundtrack of The Mission, especially the “Gabriel’s Oboe” theme, which is played in the movie by the Spanish Jesuit priest Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) as an outreaching gesture of friendship to the Paraguayan Guarani.

+++

ONLINE RETREAT: “The Art of Prayer” with Monsignor Timothy Verdon: On August 7 Paraclete Press is hosting an online retreat with Monsignor Timothy Verdon, a Roman Catholic priest and art historian based in Florence, Italy. As in his book Art and Prayer: The Beauty of Turning to God, Msgr. Verdon will reflect on the ways in which visual art has historically supported, and can still support, prayer, guiding participants in meditating on images from the lives of Christ, Mary, and the saints. View the schedule and reserve your ticket here.

Timothy Verdon

+++

CHORAL ANTHEM: “Lead Me, Lord” | Text: Psalm 5:8, Psalm 4:9 | Music by Samuel Sebastian Wesley, 1905 | Performed by the Chapel Choir of Girton College, Cambridge, June 2020 [HT: Malcolm Guite]

Lead me, Lord,
Lead me in thy righteousness;
Make thy way plain before my face.
For it is thou, Lord,
Thou, Lord, only,
That makest me dwell in safety.

Roundup: Advent art, songs, poems

Victoria Emily Jones6 Comments

So much to share today! Be sure not to miss “Psalm 126” by Drew Miller (a new favorite Advent song) and Matthew Milliner’s excellent presentation on the Virgin Mary in art, which opened an exhibition that’s running in Southern California—both below. (If you only have time to take in a few items from this post, those are the ones I’d recommend.)

PODCAST EPISODE: “A Time for Wanting and Waiting: An Advent Conversation with W. David O. Taylor”: In this recent episode of The Road to Now, hosts Bob Crawford and Chris Breslin interview liturgical theologian David Taylor [previously] about the season of Advent: what it is, its history and how it fits into the wider church year (see especially 43:29ff.), the canon of Advent and Christmas songs, and the gift the Psalms offers us during this season. Referencing his 2015 Washington Post article, Taylor says our picture of Christ’s coming, especially as expressed through our hymnody, tends to be unidimensional and far too sanitized:

We should permit the Nativity stories to remain as strange and bizarre and fantastical and difficult as they in fact are, rather than taming and distilling them down to this one nugget or theme of effusive joy. There is effusive joy in that—it’s simply that that’s not the only thing that characterizes these stories. Unfortunately, most of our canon of Christmas carols or hymns tends to focus on what I would argue is only 50 percent of the Nativity stories. Everything that begins with Elizabeth and Zechariah and goes all the way to, say, Anna and Simeon and the visit of the Magi and the flight to Egypt . . . it really is one whole story that is being told with these subplots.

I would love to see us create . . . new music that either retells portions that we are already telling but not the whole of it, or we need to tell parts that have not yet been told. . . . Let’s ask ourselves how God is at work in all the minor-key or difficult or dissonant parts of the Nativity stories, not absent from—those are not extraneous to God incarnating himself in Jesus Christ. Those are essential parts of it. And so how can our hymns become ways of praying ourselves into these stories so they can sink deeply into the fibers of our hearts and minds and bodies, and for us to say, “Oh, all the weird and difficult and dissonant parts of our lives are part and parcel of God’s good work,” not, again, on the margins of it, or things we should eschew.

To help deepen and expand the church’s repertoire of Christmas music, Taylor founded, along with a few others, the Christmas Songwriters Project. The Psalms are an inspiration in this task, as they express a joy that is at times quiet and at others raucous, as in the Nativity narratives, and that exists as part of a dynamic constellation of emotions and postures that praise can encompass. Most of us don’t recognize the pure, undistilled happiness that is marketed to us throughout December, Taylor says, and we shouldn’t force ourselves to try to feel it but rather should take a cue from the Psalms and also see the same emotional complexity at work at the beginning of the Gospels:

The Psalms, and I think Christian faith at its heart, can make space for joy and sorrow to exist alongside each other in a way that happiness, as we commonly understand it, cannot, or only with great difficulty. . . . What the psalms of praise do . . . is that in one movement, there’s this effusive joy or a shouting joy or a convivial joy, and then it segues to a quieter joy or a contemplative joy or a yearning, painful kind of joy. . . .

So in the season of Advent, when we look at the characters in scripture—you know, Mary and Joseph and Zechariah and Elizabeth and the shepherds and Anna and Simeon—every one of them has this moment, perhaps, of which we could say, “That sounds like joy.” . . . But immediately before or immediately after, it transitions to something else. So does that mean that joy is negated? Is joy squashed? Is joy extinguished? Or is joy able to continue to exist side by side, to subsist, with a continued experience of longing or a sudden moment of sadness?

+++

ART BY SCOTT ERICKSON: This month Portland-based artist Scott Erickson has been posting on Instagram Advent-themed images he has made, along with thoughtful meditations. Some emphasize the bodiliness of the Incarnation, which often gets overlooked, presumably out of a sense of propriety. But “grace comes to us floating in embryonic fluid . . . embedded in the uterine wall of a Middle Eastern teenage woman,” Erickson writes about With Us – With Child, to which one Instagrammer responded, “This is trajectory changing. Thank you for this. Nipples, vaginas, and Jesus CAN coexist!” Another mentioned how she had never seen Mary with a belly button and a linea nigra before. The image reminds us that Jesus was indeed “born of woman” (Gal. 4:4).

Erickson, Scott_With Us, With Child
Scott Erickson (American, 1977–), With Us – With Child, 2016 [purchase as poster]
Another imaginative image suggests that Christ came to set the world on fire, so to speak. God, who is of old, gives himself to earth as a Jewish babe (“Love has always been FOR GIVENESS,” Erickson writes), sparking a revolution.

Erickson, Scott_Advent
Art by Scott Erickson

View more art by Scott Erickson @scottthepainter.

+++

LECTIONARY POEMS FOR ADVENT: This year Englewood Review of Books launched a new feature on their website: a weekly post of four to six poems that resonate with the Revised Common Lectionary readings for that week. “We will offer here a broad selection of classic and contemporary poems from diverse poets that stir our imaginations with thoughts of how the biblical text speaks to us in the twenty-first century. We hope that these poems will be fruitful not only for preachers who will be preaching these texts on the coming Sunday, but also for church members in the pews, as a way to prime our minds for encountering the biblical texts.” I’m really enjoying these stellar selections, several of which are new to me.

Continue reading “Roundup: Advent art, songs, poems” →

Reformation Roundup

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

FIVE R’S FOR REFORMATION COMMEMORATION

As a guard against Reformed hubris, Churches Together in England has issued a statement urging churches to mark the Reformation’s fifth centenary with sensitivity to other branches of the faith, providing 5 R’s as guidelines. Keep the anniversary, it says, with the spirit of

Rejoicing – because of the joy in the gospel which we share, and because what we have in common is greater than that which divides; and that God is patient with our divisions, that we are coming back together and can learn from each other.

Remembering – because all three streams of the Reformation have their witnesses and one church’s celebration could be another’s painful memory; and yet all believed they acted in the cause of the gospel of Jesus Christ for their time.

Reforming – because the Church needs always to grow closer to Christ, and therefore closer to all who proclaim him Lord, and it is by the mutual witness of faith that we will approach the unity for which Christ prayed for his followers.

Repenting – because the splintering of our unity led us to formulate stereotypes and prejudices about each other’s traditions which have too often diverted our attention from our calling as witnesses together to the mercy of God in proclamation and service to the world.

Reconciling – because the call to oneness in Christ begins from the perspective of unity not division, strengthening what is held in common, even though the differences are more easily seen and experienced.

This is not to say we can’t celebrate the achievements of the Reformation (we certainly should!), but we ought not to do so with denigration toward our Catholic brothers and sisters, nor hold our own branch above reproof. All church history, before and after the major splits, is our history as a body. Read the full CTE statement here. For other initiatives to foster common witness, service, and understanding between Protestants and Catholics, see the documents “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (1994) and “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” (1999).

+++

ECUMENICAL ARTS SYMPOSIUM

The last two weekends in October will cap off the international “Arts and Ecumenism” symposium organized by the Mount Tabor Ecumenical Centre for Art and Spirituality to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. With events in Paris, Strasbourg, and Florence, the symposium is now coming to the US to continue the discussion on Catholic and Protestant approaches to art.

The penultimate session, “Sacred Arts in North American Contexts,” will take place October 20–21 at Yale University. “Arts in Celebration: The Word in Color, Action, Music, and Form,” the final session, will take place October 27–29 at the Community of Jesus in Orleans, Massachusetts, and will include demonstrations of mosaic, fresco, and Gregorian chant; lectures and panel discussions with Timothy Verdon, William Dyrness, Deborah Sokolove, and others; exhibits of contemporary sacred art by Susan S. Kanaga and Filippo Rossi (view the catalog); liturgies of the Divine Office and Holy Eucharist; an organ recital; and a fully staged presentation of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s opera The Pilgrim’s Progress, performed by the community’s critically acclaimed Gloriae Dei Cantores choir and Elements Theatre Company. Click here for the schedule.

I stayed at the Community of Jesus last week, and trust me, $425 is a great price for two days and nights at this beautiful Cape Cod monastery, with its Benedictine hospitality, and access to a high caliber of visual, musical, and dramatic art and prominent voices in the field of Christianity and the arts. But the best part, I think, will be the opportunity to inhabit the ecumenical vision the community has established, whereby all Christians—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—live together, eat together, and worship together. Some community members have taken vows of celibacy, while others have chosen marriage and live with spouse and children on the compound. Partaking of the Eucharist last Friday with brothers and sisters from other streams of Christianity and multiple generations was an experience I will not soon forget. Be sure to take advantage of the early-bird registration discount, which ends September 1.

(Click here to take a virtual tour of the Community of Jesus’s Church of the Transfiguration.)

Church of the Transfiguration
Church of the Transfiguration, Orleans, Massachusetts. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones

Vento by Filippo Rossi
Vento (detail) by Filippo Rossi, from the exhibition “Spirito Creatore”

+++

PAST LECTURE: “Visual Ecumenism” by Matthew Milliner: Milliner is an evangelical Anglican who teaches art history (his specialization is Byzantine) at a Protestant liberal arts college in Illinois. In this talk given April 7, 2017, at the Wheaton Theology Conference “Come, Let Us Eat Together!,” he discusses how we can “put on” other Christian traditions without losing our own by engaging their artistic output, by opening ourselves up to the material expressions of the gospel present all across the denominational spectrum:

I’m taking a particularly cherished part of my tradition—the law/gospel distinction—and showing that it can be found in other traditions as well. This might seem like I’m colonizing other traditions with my Protestantism, but I’m actually trying to strip my own tradition of its exclusive possession of this message and see it elsewhere, so that evangelicals can be at home in late medieval Catholic devotional manuals or in Russian Orthodox cathedrals. (19:04)

In reverse chronological fashion, he examines Lucas Cranach’s Law and Grace (Protestant), Berthold Furtmeyr’s Tree of Life and Death (Catholic), and the Sinai Pantocrator icon (Orthodox). Michelangelo’s late drawings and tomb for Pope Julius II are discussed in light of his involvement in the Spirituali, a Catholic reform movement in Italy that emphasized intensive personal study of scripture and justification by faith. More personally, Milliner describes how he was able to make it through repeated Hail Marys during a Catholic prayer service he inadvertently stumbled into one time and, on another Marian note, shares the Madonna of Mercy mural created last year by a group of Protestant art students he co-taught in Orvieto, Italy, with Bruce Herman, showing how they honored this subject that originated outside their tradition while also bringing it in line with their theological convictions—which, they discovered, were corroborated by Vatican II. In an earlier essay on visual ecumenism, Milliner wrote,

Just as there is, according to our Bibles, ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism,’ so perhaps there is also one variegated yet unified Christian aesthetic, to which the different traditions, at their utter best, ascend. Full maturity (which for evangelicals has been a long time coming!) is not to see with Protestant, Orthodox or Catholic eyes—but with the eyes of Christ.

Madonna of Mercy (Gordon in Orvieto)
Madonna of Mercy painting by the 2016 Gordon in Orvieto cohort

Milliner has given similar talks in the past: “Toward a Visual Ecumenism,” at Duke; “Toward 2017: Visualizing Christian Unity,” at George Fox; “Altars on the Jordan and the Rhine,” at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg; “Against Confessional Aesthetics,” at Baylor; and “Hearing Law, Seeing Gospel: A Mockingbird History of Art,” at the 2017 Mockingbird Conference. I hope they turn into a book!

+++

UPCOMING LECTURE: “An Evening with Ken Myers: Luther’s Artistic Legacy,” Saturday, September 9, 7:30 p.m., Wallace Presbyterian Church, College Park, Maryland: To kick off its second season, the Eliot Society has scheduled Mars Hill Audio founder Ken Myers to discuss Martin Luther’s contributions to Christian hymnody. “With the help of some local musicians, Myers will examine the artistic climate Luther helped to create, as well as some of the great composers of sacred music who followed after him. The lecture will argue that the pattern of Luther’s artistic engagement provides a model for contemporary efforts to reconnect faith and the arts.” Click on the link above to reserve your free ticket.

+++

FROM THE ARCHIVES: “An early Protestant painting (commissioned by Luther)”: On my previous blog I wrote a post about an altarpiece Martin Luther commissioned from his friend Lucas Cranach to promote Protestant theology. (It’s the same painting Milliner opens his above talk with.) Luther was more accepting of religious images than many of his fellow reformers, elucidating his position in his Invocavit Sermons (1522) and in the treatise Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments (1525). I plan to feature vast swaths of these texts on Art & Theology in the near future.

Law and Grace by Lucas Cranach the Elder
Lucas Cranach the Elder (German, 1472–1553), Law and Grace, 1529. Tempera on linden wood, 82.2 × 118 cm. Castle Museum Schloss Freidenstein, Gotha, Germany.

Roundup: Advent as a season of pregnancy, an Oh Hellos Christmas, jumbo cathedral tapestry, new film column, music education ministry

Victoria Emily Jones4 Comments

“ART OF ADVENT” SERMON: In his chapel address last December at Wheaton College, assistant professor of art history Matthew Milliner opened with a marriage analogy: If you love your spouse, you’ve got to love their parents. Do we love Mary and Joseph? Have we even met them? “Before the swaddled baby comes the swollen belly,” Milliner reminds us. He helps us dwell in those nine months before Christ’s birth, showing examples of the Virgin of the Sign icon (“ultrasound Jesus”) and Marc Chagall’s modern interpretation of it; these images are good for “target practice,” he says: for focusing our primary affections on Christ. He also shares how Mariko Mori’s video piece Miko No Inori (The Shaman-Girl’s Prayer) reminds him of a Visitation sculpture group by a fourteenth-century German artist, who inset Mary and Elizabeth’s bellies with a gem. Advent is a season of pregnancy, in which we are called to bear Christ within us. Not only that, it’s about “the pregnancy of a groaning planet,” waiting for deliverance from suffering. This address was given a few weeks after the death of Wheaton English professor Brett Foster, and Milliner notes how putting Brett’s body in the ground was an Advent act, in that we wait for it to rise.

The Pregnant Woman by Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall (Russian/French, 1887–1985), The Pregnant Woman, 1913. Oil on canvas. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

+++

CHRISTMAS EXTRAVAGANZA TOUR + MUSIC DOWNLOAD: The Oh Hellos—folk rock sibling duo Maggie and Tyler Heath (and my husband Eric’s favorite band)—are hitting up eight US cities on their Christmas Extravaganza Tour this month, each show “an evening of Christmas music, carols, originals, bad jokes, sing-alongs, dancing, revelry, and all the holiday cheer you can squeeze into one room!” Sure to be featured are the four “movements” from their Family Christmas Album, which blend carol excerpts: “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” with “The Coventry Carol”; “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night” with “O Come, All Ye Faithful”; “Silent Night”; and “Joy to the World” with “I Saw Three Ships.” I’ve embedded the first one in the player below. They’re offering this Christmas album for free download at NoiseTrade (tips appreciated), or if you want a physical disc, you can purchase it from Bandcamp.

+++

VISUAL MEDITATION: My latest visual meditation for ArtWay is on the gigantic Christ in Glory tapestry by Graham Sutherland that hangs behind the altar of Coventry Cathedral—one of many modern church art commissions in England necessitated by World War II bomb damage. Visiting the cathedral in 2013 was one of the most spiritually rich experiences I’ve ever had, and I plan to share it on this blog sometime in the future. Such a variety of artists were involved in the interior decoration program, and somehow it all comes together, collectively testifying to the power of resurrection. Sutherland wrote of his aspirations for the Christ figure: “The figure must look real—in the sense that it is not a rehash of the past. It must look vital; non sentimental, non-ecclesiastical; of the moment: yet for all time.” I’m taken by the final result, but an elderly gentleman who observed me staring at it for a while approached me and told me how much he hates it, how he thinks the eyes look unkind. (The man has lived in Coventry his whole life and remembers worshiping in the original cathedral before the war.) What do you think?

Christ in Glory by Graham Sutherland
Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph. Tapestry designed by Graham Sutherland (British, 1903–1980) and woven by Pinton Frères in France, 1962. Dimensions: 75 × 38 ft. Location: Coventry Cathedral, Coventry, UK.

+++

FILM COLUMN: This fall I’ve really been enjoying film critic Jeffrey Overstreet’s new Christianity Today column, “Viewer Discussion Advised,” designed to help Christians discuss and explore a broad range of films. His kickoff article on the foreign drama Timbuktu, which is about the city’s occupation by Muslim extremists, highlights how it “bears artistic witness to the sufferings of our neighbors.” (Quoting Frederick Buechner: “If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors.”) “Christians can choose to dwell on—and invest in—movies that show us what we already like, tell us what we already know, assure us of our own salvation, and make us feel happily entertained. That isn’t wrong. But might we make better use of our time? Might we exercise courage and conscience, step outside of our comfort zones, attend to our neighbors, and learn from their experiences?”

Through a Screen Darkly

In addition to Timbuktu, Overstreet has covered the comedy The Station Agent; the US criminal justice system documentary 13th; the Hitchcock thriller Vertigo; the biographical drama A Man for All Seasons; the Marvel superhero flick Doctor Strange; the Coen brothers’ comedies; and the sci-fi feature Arrival, ending each article with group discussion questions. Overstreet has been writing about art, film, and faith for more than a decade at LookingCloser.org and is the author of Through a Screen Darkly: Looking Closer at Beauty, Truth, and Evil in the Movies. He is currently teaching an online film course for Houston Baptist University and creative writing at Seattle Pacific University. To receive weekly installments of “Viewer Discussion Advised” to your email inbox, sign up for the CT Entertainment Newsletter.

+++

MUSIC VIDEO: My friend Nabil Ince is a third-year music major at Covenant College who writes and produces music under the rap name Seaux Chill. After an internship this summer he became assistant program director for the New City Fellowship–based nonprofit East Lake Expression Engine in Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose mission is to provide children in the East Lake neighborhood with a free music education in a gospel-centered environment. Inspired by the El Sistema movement, the organization believes that music is an effective avenue for developing children’s creativity and problem-solving skills and for building up a strong community. They provide year-round classes on music history, theory, composition, and performance, including choir, bucket band, and orchestra. Below is the music video for “It Always Rains on Tuesdays,” a song Nabil wrote for the kids. The refrain is “Feed the plants / Clean all the cars / Fill the potholes / Tears from the stars.”

Book Review: The Image of God in an Image Driven Age, ed. Beth Felker Jones and Jeffrey W. Barbeau

Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

The Image of God in an Image Driven AgeThe doctrine of the imago Dei—which states that human beings were uniquely created in the image of God and continue to bear that image—is central to Christian theology, for it tells us who (and Whose) we are. The book The Image of God in an Image Driven Age: Explorations in Theological Anthropology (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2016), edited by Beth Felker Jones and Jeffrey W. Barbeau, delves into that doctrine, examining its implications for relationships, ethics, sexuality, consumer visual culture, art making, dissemination of the gospel, and more. Comprising twelve essays that resulted from the 2015 Wheaton Theology Conference, the book explores what it means to be made in God’s image and issues a challenge: that we resist all the false images that try to topple the one true image in our lives.

Two of the chapters revolve around visual images. In chapter 5, “Culture Breaking: In Praise of Iconoclasm,” Matthew J. Milliner starts out by stating that we live in an optocracy—that is, we are ruled by what our eyes see. Advertisements (billboards, commercials, magazines, web banners), celebrity coverage, and product packaging and store displays are high up on the throne, and we think and act according to their influence.

To illustrate the takeover of unedifying imagery, he cites Limelight Shops, a mini-mall in New York City that inhabits the deconsecrated Church of the Holy Communion. Where a Christian community once thrived, signage and shop displays now parody Christianity, beckoning shoppers to “be transformed,” to try on True Religion jeans in confession-booth dressing rooms, and to indulge in a “slice of heaven” at the pizzeria.

Milliner calls for opposition to the deleterious aspects of our optocracy, a reclamation of our iconoclastic heritage (which, he notes later with examples, belongs to all three branches of Christianity, not just Protestantism):

Evangelicals have spent the last half of the century embarrassed of their iconoclastic heritage and attempting to make themselves culturally serious. But the challenge that is so clear in the case of Limelight Shops might spur us to reactivate our iconoclastic heritage as well. Our charge may be not only to go about culture making but to do some culture breaking as well, for breaking is what the people of God do when they find themselves in Babylon. (112)

He endorses not a literal breaking but a mental and rhetorical breaking, much as the Israelites did when they were in Babylon (e.g., Jeremiah 10:5). We need to break the power certain images hold over us, say no to their attempts to shape and define us. God alone can tell us who we truly are, and we bear his imprint.

Many contemporary artists in the macro–art world would claim to share Milliner’s iconoclastic impulse, but in practice, most of them fail to effectively break anything, and Milliner gives a few examples of those failures. Then he recounts several successes from within his own immediate sphere: works by his art faculty colleagues at Wheaton College. Among the commendable works he discusses are Jeremy Botts’s Bee in Hand; Greg Halvorsen Schreck’s Lambertian photograph The Shroud and his American Trinity and the Cry of the Deer (I covered Botts’s and Schreck’s Via Dolorosa cycle in February); David J. P. Hooker’s Corpus (pictured on the book’s cover); and Joel Sheesley’s Camels and his Good Shepherd mural at the local All Souls Anglican Church—all of which are reproduced as halftones in the book. These artists demonstrate different ways to break by making and vice versa—to engage in “creative destruction,” as Philip Jenkins puts it in the final chapter (259).

Camels by Joel Sheesley
Joel Sheesley (American, 1950–), Camels, 1993. Oil on canvas, 58 × 53 in. In the narthex of All Souls Anglican Church, Wheaton, Illinois.

Continue reading “Book Review: The Image of God in an Image Driven Age, ed. Beth Felker Jones and Jeffrey W. Barbeau” →