The Aesthete and the Monk: Against Moralism
By Editorial Statement Issue 114
Can the aesthetic life lead us to God?
Read MoreWhat You See Is You: Rowan Williams and the Art that Surrenders
By Editorial Statement Issue 113
The microcosmic richness of human identity is a reflection of the God who not only made us but sees us, knows us, and speaks to us. Our being addressed by the divine is an infinite well for human possibility.
Read MoreEvading Capture: Art and the Territory of Knowing
By Issue 112
Artworks can transform our intellectual landscape and reorient the questions we ask, even in the sciences.
Read MorePicturing Silence: Stillness in Sound of Metal
By Editorial Statement Issue 111
Stillness is hard. This is going to take practice.
Read MoreThe Way of the Critic: To Judge Is to Love
By Editorial Statement Issue 110
Good criticism also helps us see why some art doesn’t work, or works poorly, activating the worst in us. When criticism is judgmental in the sense of being censorious, that too is in the service of art and our experience. The critic is showing us why we need and deserve better.
Read MoreThe Absolute Is Available to Everyone
By Editorial Statement Issue 109
When the dots connect, you feel a pulse of intentionality in a universe that seems to be putting on this show just for you. I wonder if those of us who dwell in books are especially susceptible to such delights.
Read MoreHow to Visit a Museum: Disciplines of Availability
By Editorial Statement Issue 108
I’m waiting for that strange experience when a picture speaks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a shout, sometimes with a reverberating silence that pulls me to the edge of a precipice where I’m not sure whether I’ll fall or fly.
Read MoreHealing the Imagination: Art Lessons from James Baldwin
By Editorial Statement Issue 107
Our society is grappling with a soul-sickness that is ultimately an infection of our imagination. An election may address symptoms, but how do we treat the underlying disease? How to heal the imagination? Perhaps this is what the arts are for.
Read MoreA Devotional Temperament: A Conversation with Garth Greenwell
By Interview Issue 106
One of the extraordinary accomplishments of the Confessions is to find a syntax that doesn’t deny impasse or dilemma, but that also doesn’t allow impasse or dilemma to become stagnant.
Read MoreSolitude as Art
By Editorial Statement Issue 105
Like the strange paradox of social distancing, where we step away from our neighbors in order to protect them, so the artist loves the world by retreating from it. The art of solitude is ultimately social.
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