Posts Tagged ‘art and faith’
Before the Fall of Baseball
June 16, 2015
Much as the Greeks lived in close proximity to their gods, who dwelled on Mt. Olympus, my family lived in Odessa, Missouri, only a half-hour’s drive from Kansas City, where the Royals loomed larger than life for me.
Read MoreThe Thing Itself: Art and Poverty, Part 2
June 9, 2015
Among those who work on behalf of them, it has become a truism that our first obligation toward our less fortunate brothers and sisters is to first recognize and celebrate their humanity. What is less often recognized is the vital role that art can play in such a process.
Read MoreCreation, Evolution, and the Over-Active Imagination, Part 2
March 27, 2014
In yesterday’s post I had to skip over a lot of detail and nuance, but only to make what I hope is a fair point: that behind much of the polemics of the evolutionism controversy lies an imagination that has got out of hand. The problem is not with the imaginative drive to find and construct patterns, which help us make sense of things, or the fact it often works with metaphors. The difficulties start when the imagination gets over-confident too quickly, ending up with patterns that extend beyond their proper use, and thus distort our view of reality.
Read MoreBeyond Sight: The Imago Dei Project
January 28, 2014
Across separations of time, media, scale, and—most of all—intentionality, painter and glacier seemed to have stumbled upon the same set of formulas.
Read MoreThe Contemporary Novel of Belief, Part 2
January 9, 2014
In yesterday’s post I wrote about author and critic Paul Elie’s contention that few contemporary writers depict characters struggling with religious belief in novels with contemporary settings. Among other things, I argued that his conviction that having a contemporary setting is somehow supremely valuable is both short-sighted and literalistic—that Elie has a rather narrow understanding…
Read MoreThe Contemporary Novel of Belief, Part 1
January 8, 2014
Writing a response to a published essay can be seen as public service, a way of contributing to the larger cultural conversation. On the other hand, writing several responses within a relatively short period of time can easily come across as carping or sour grapes. That consideration is very much at the forefront of my…
Read MoreFace to Face: The Imago Dei Project
December 30, 2013
In November, I attended a colloquy presented by Image on Evolution and the Imago Dei: The Artist as Translator—a significant subject about which I could write pages. Instead, I am going to write about something simpler: the value of people coming together, to be near each other, to talk face to face.
Read MoreOpting for Paradox: 25 Years of Image
November 22, 2013
The poet Ezra Pound made the phrase “Make It New” the rallying cry of artistic modernism. In one of life’s little ironies, he obtained the phrase from an ancient Chinese text. It seems that every time you get excited about making it new, you are forced to recollect the words of another ancient, the moralist…
Read MoreEve, the Apple, and the Need To Know: The Imago Dei Project
October 29, 2013
I’ve been thinking about Genesis lately. In this past month, the lectionary included Eve’s succumbing to the serpent and my study group talked about the troubling fallout in perceptions of gender roles, about what might have happened if Eve hadn’t eaten the apple, about a human tendency toward disobedience.
Read MoreThe Image Top 25 Contemporary Writers of Faith List
September 9, 2013
“I’m sick of Flannery O’Connor.” That was the opening sentence of a recent piece by Randy Boyagoda for First Things magazine. It’s what journalists call “a strong lede,” especially when you consider that First Things readers are likely to revere the memory of Miss O’Connor. (He’s also tired of several other major writers from Hopkins…
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