Today’s conversation is with Image’s new visual arts editor, Aaron Rosen.

Aaron is Professor of Religion & Visual Culture and Director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary. But he also generates and participates in conversations about religion and the arts outside of academia. He’s spoken at universities, museums, and religious institutions around the world. He writes books about art for adults and children; he’s contributed to newspapers and magazines, and provided commentary for the BBC. He also enjoys working directly with artists and has co-curated exhibitions, including an international traveling Stations of the Cross.

Aaron is Jewish, and his wife, Carolyn Rosen, is an Episcopal priest, so he has a special interest in thinking about and practicing inter-faith dialogue. He wants to bring an expansive, multi-faith element to Image’s art coverage while we remain fully engaged in the contemporary art world. He has what he calls an “old-fashioned commitment to really good art,” because the best art, he says, helps us think better theologically.

I talked to Aaron about growing up with a Jewish father and Catholic mother; how religion is, for him, a creative experience; and why we need to have, literally, more faith in art.

Resources:

• Aaron Rosen interviews Anne McCoy for Brooklyn Rail  
• Sensation: Young British Artists at the Brooklyn Museum
• Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy
• Ad Reinhardt’s “black paintings”
• Graham Greene: “God in the Details,” from the New Yorker
• When Art Disrupts Religion by Philip Salim Francis
• Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion
• My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
• The (Art) Stations of the Cross
• Michael Takeo Magruder, Lamentation for the Forsaken 
• St. Veronica as patron saint of photographers 
• Father Marie-Alain Coutourier

Credits

• Original music composed by Sister Sinjin
• Episode produced by Cassidy Hall and Roy Salmond.