More on: heritage

An artist’s role is to awaken all senses so that we are truly alive and active… Physical connection, especially in the performing arts, is essential for creation.

  New Plymouth   WHAT DROVE SUCH PILGRIMS across the sea of southern Idaho, dry plain, sage and antelope? Doesn’t any place hold God, smooth stones to pillow dreams of angels, one rock fitted upon another, raising the pilgrim’s testament: I have come as far as here? How did the displaced, one by one, know…

Neighbors, Strangers,  Family, Friends Four Artists Reflect on Charis The traveling art exhibition Charis—Boundary Crossings: Neighbors Strangers Family Friends features work by seven Asian and seven North American artists. The show grew out of a two-week seminar in Indonesia sponsored by Calvin College’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity and the Council for…

i.m. Matt Laffan 1970–2009 Four villages in Ireland knew never to mingle their blood but such lore gets lost in the emigrations. Matt Laffan’s parents learned it in their marriage of genes they would not share again. They raised him up through captaincies and law degrees. He exalted them with his verve and clarities, sat…

THE YEAR 1992 marked the release of a film that challenged all conventional notions of filmmaking—and that nevertheless received nearly universal critical acclaim, much to the surprise of its makers. That film was Baraka. Filmed at 152 locations in twenty-four countries on six continents with no narrative or dialogue, Baraka was described as “a guided…

ACROSS THE HIGHWAY are a Taco Bell, a Comfort Inn, and a free-standing building that houses a Chinese buffet. A Case tractor company is nearby, and what looks to be an old service station, deserted, with orange-and-tan panels on the garage door and wild grass sprouting through the asphalt. Somewhat disconcerting is an abandoned Wal-Mart, a…

THE SPADE, ACCORDING to artist and former East Los Angeles gang member Fabian “Spade” Debora, is the craftiest card in the deck, the card that “takes all. The spade is a subtle and powerful symbol.” From that childhood insight, gleaned growing up in one of Los Angeles’s most violent public housing projects, came the graffiti…

You, who seek grace from a distracted God, you, who parse the rhetoric of empire, who know in your guts what it is but don’t know what to call it, you, good son of a race of shadows— your great fortune is to have a job, never ate government cheese, federal peanut butter— you, jerked…

The following essay, in slightly different form, was delivered as a eulogy for Charles Hull Wolfe at his memorial service in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on November 23, 2014.   LIKE MOST EARLY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES, mine are vague and fragmentary, faded snapshots that are probably half-invented, based on things my parents told me and the mind’s hunger…