More on: art

MY SUMMER WITH SYLVIA was like sighting deer in the woods. You hold your breath, try hard not to spoil it. Suddenly you have nowhere to be, nothing to do. You’re a kid again. It’s hide-and-seek—you’re hiding. Later, if somebody asks how your walk was, what can you say? “I saw a deer,” you say.…

GALA BENT WAS ONCE a landscape painter who lived in Indiana, born and raised in the Midwest. Her paintings, acrylic on paper, featured dark, heavy, and flat horizontal spaces. But she used to dream about mountains. That is, until she found herself surrounded by them. When she and her husband, fellow artist Zack Bent, moved…

In issue 83, Wayne Roosa writes about a surprising conversation with his art history students about the parallels between Old Testament prophets and contemporary performance artists—a conversation that led to a new way of looking at performance work. We asked him about this art genre, one that many viewers find hard to connect with.    Image:…

Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It by Loren Eiseley (Doubleday, 1958) Science and Faith: A New Introduction by John F. Haught (Paulist, 2013) Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love by Elizabeth A. Johnson (Bloomsbury, 2014) Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith by Philip Kitcher (Oxford, 2007)  …

Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution   In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…

Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution   In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…

Jeremy Begbie is the inaugural holder of the Thomas A. Langford Research Professorship in Theology at Duke Divinity School and founding director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts. He teaches systematic theology and specializes in the interface between theology and the arts. With his PhD from the University of Aberdeen, Begbie has taught…

When the concertmaster gestures to the oboe, silence flutters through the massive hall. Then comes the tuning up. Before that, though— go back. Before the obedient violin falls to his A, before the flutes, trombones, and tuba head like horses in the same direction to plow and plant one of Beethoven’s great fields. Go back.…

Implicitry \im-‘pli-sət-trē\ noun L. 1. the study of the implied lives of trees. 2. the connection, at cellular or unnamed levels, between vegetable and animal entities. 3. involved in the nature of nature. 4. archaic: entwined with trees.   THE PHONE RINGS. An unfamiliar Florida area code; it could be an alligator or a mouse…