More on: art

The following is adapted from the preface to The Operation of Grace: Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery. My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou art…

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear! Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men; Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude.  Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The…

The role or purpose of art in our lives is to serve as a reminder. We have a sense that the world of perception is illusive and created. Through the acceptance of the gifts of beauty we feel that we are able to draw back the veil cast over our senses, if only briefly, and…

A longer version of this essay appears as the introduction to God in the Gallery: A Christian Approach to Modern Art, forthcoming this fall from Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright 2008.    For my wife, Kerri, and children, Daniel, Morgan, and Jacob WE THINK WE KNOW what art is. And that…

After Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Illuminated manuscript, 1410-1416 Like dancers in a pirouette the mowers with their scythes, their polished rhythms whispering through harvest’s green ballet. Two women turn the tumbled hay, so slight and stockingless and lithe one could wish the world this script, no hail of brightness perishing through…

Sent from Troy, Alabama, September 1, 2005 All things fall, all things are built again…. ————(For Bill Thompson) How empty ring the petitions of the saved, Like wind notes in an afterthought of wind When the storm’s done, though the ravaged Nearby you, nearby your salvaged town, Troop like ragged pilgrims to some central dome…

The following remarks were given at Villa Agape in Florence, Italy, on the opening evening of Image’s Florence Seminar, September 14, 2008.   IMAGE is a journal devoted exclusively to contemporary literature and art—to the present moment—but here we are in the cradle of the Renaissance. We have not come out of mere antiquarian curiosity,…

after Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise The experts are saving the prophets and their wall, ___the prophets and the law, and the door ______to paradise. What does it profit ________a man to gain the whole, the world Yet to lose, or to loose his head from the Renaissance ___and its gilt-stripped doors of bronze? ______The fire-gilded…

Edward Hopper, oil on canvas, 1927 Nothing automatic or newly modern here, nothing springs open to dispense a bowl of hot soup or a cool slice of pie in exchange for coins. But neither will a waiter intrude. The young woman sits alone, fashionably dressed and without expectation. Surely someone said he would meet her,…

THERE WAS a great blackened pan being eased out of the greasy oven by a tiny old woman in padded oven gloves. No one in the crowded kitchen—yellow walls, hideous mess, marijuana smoke and incense—came forward to help her. But someone, a joker, called out “What is it this time, Scottie? One of your concoctions?”…