In a few weeks I’ll be participating in the sixth annual Mockingbird Conference in New York City. The mission of Mockingbird Ministries is to connect the Christian faith to the day-to-day realities of life. And culture in all its diverse forms is the means by which we life out our daily lives. This year’s conference [Read More...]

The confrontation between Elisha and Naamen in 2 Kings 5 is one of the more provocative texts in all of the Scriptures. In this short chapel devotion given at Knox Theological Seminary in December, I reflect on perhaps the most difficult and often-overlooked aspects of this story ( v. 15-19), in which Elisha blesses Naamen’s vocation. [Read More...]

A painting is not its interpretation. At the moment it encounters me in the art museum, a painting exists for me. But it does not need me. It exists for me in a particular way, a way that challenges my control, rendering me receptive (i.e., passive). T.S. Eliot once said that the meaning of a poem exists [Read More...]

Rublev Fasts Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic film, The Passion of Andrei Rublev (1966) is a Lenten film par excellence. It depicts the spiritual struggle of one of Russia’s great cultural heroes, the painter of icons Andrei Rublev (1360-1430), who is most famous for his stunningly original, The Holy Trinity (c. 1420). Although I wrote about the [Read More...]

  One of the more notorious and inexplicable works of art of the last sixty years is Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Influenced by a resurgence of interest in the work of the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp and performance art, Rauschenberg [Read More...]

  Yesterday my review of a new monograph on the Spanish realist painter Antonio López García, entitled “Jousting the Quince Tree,” appeared over at Books & Culture online. Although I was aware of his work, my respect for López García  increased dramatically in the process of studying his paintings. In addition, I stumbled upon a documentary film, [Read More...]

Last week I was in Pittsburgh to speak on modern art and grace at the annual Jubilee conference, an event that brings 2,000 college students together to connect their faith to their work. After my presentation, a person working in campus ministry asked me how he could support two students who happen to be artists. [Read More...]

One post on the paintings of Paul Cézanne’s is not enough and so I explored his relentless engagement with nature in “The Creaturely Work of Paul Cézanne” over at ThinkChristian, where I blog from time to time.  Cézanne was relentless in his desire to do one thing: paint nature. Yet it was by returning the artist and [Read More...]

Let’s face it. Evangelicals are a pretty grumpy lot when it comes to the arts and culture. We’re perpetually on the lookout for artistic evidence to prove that this is the most evil of generations. In fact, it seems as if many of us delight in being offended so that we can crow about the [Read More...]