Playing the Victim

Last updated on: March 6, 2013 at 6:35 pm By Daniel Harrell

While in Jerusalem last week, with plans to go to Bethlehem, the US State Department issued a travel warning against US citizens entering the West Bank. There had been violence protests on one street over ongoing Palestinian prisoner treatment in Israel. Disappointed, we canceled our Nativity visit, only to be persuaded to change our mind by the Israeli Arab Director of the Jerusalem YMCA. “The American State Department and news media tends to overreact,” he said. The reason in this... Read more

The Poetry of an Erased de Kooning

Last updated on: March 5, 2013 at 10:18 am By Daniel A. Siedell

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 (1925-2008) explored the limits of art making during the first few years of his career in New York. One of the explorations consisted in erasing... Read more

Holy Spirit Conference

Last updated on: March 1, 2013 at 4:26 am By Kyle Roberts

I’m heading tomorrow to Regent University for a conference on “The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life,” hosted by the Divinity School’s Center for Renewal Studies. It looks to be a very good conference lineup, with topics including Aquinas on the Affections, Hugh of St. Victor on the gifts of the Spirit, Monasticism, Kierkegaard, and Blumhardt on apocalyptic pneumatology (the latter by my Bethel colleague, Christian Winn). I’ll be giving a paper on the mission of the church in the... Read more

The Futility of Painting

Last updated on: February 27, 2013 at 7:06 pm By Daniel A. Siedell

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, El Sol del Membrillo (The Quince Tree Sun), directed by Victor Erice and released in 1992. The film explores López García’s meticulous working process and... Read more

Vocation and the Artist’s Studio

Last updated on: March 15, 2013 at 4:38 pm By Daniel A. Siedell

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. His question revealed just how art can challenge assumptions about vocational discipleship and a theology of work in the evangelical community. The vocation conversation in... Read more

Quantity vs Quality

Last updated on: December 30, 2013 at 10:54 am By Daniel Harrell

Today’s guest post comes from Jim Wolaver, one of an excellent class of students from Bethel Seminary who recently studied the intersection between faith, vocation and work. Christians affect those around them the same as anyone else. One aspect of my personal ministry that concerned me until recently was the number of people I ministered to. I am not a member of any organized Christian outreach, I am not a Pastor addressing a congregation on a regular basis, and I am not a... Read more

Just In Time for Lent

Last updated on: February 14, 2013 at 7:20 pm By Daniel Harrell

For 14 years I have preached an annual sermon series on the Church Fathers, those personalities who over the early centuries of church history fashioned our faith and codified that which we have come to embrace as orthodox Christianity. As there have been numerous noteworthy Church Fathers (and Mothers) it seemed sensible to tackle them a letter at a time. There was so much interest that now Patheos Press has developed these reflections into three volumes, the first of which... Read more

The IOC is Giving Up Wrestling for Lent

Last updated on: February 14, 2013 at 6:35 pm By Kyle Roberts

Cutting the oldest Olympic sport from the Olympics is a bad idea. But that’s exactly what the IOC is proposing for 2020. Once it is out of the olympics (to make room for modern pentathalon, wakeboarding, wushu and a few others). I’ve got nothing against those sports (I don’t know what some of them are), but I do know that wrestling is one of the oldest sports, dating back to when Greeks and the Romans started this whole deal. As... Read more

Getting What You Pray For

Last updated on: February 13, 2013 at 11:01 am By Daniel Harrell

Giving, fasting and prayer are the traditional Lenten disciplines due to Jesus’ mention of them in Matthew 6. I find prayer to be the hardest. I find giving and fasting hard to do too, but at least they seem more tangible. You can see the results of giving and feel the results of fasting. But not with prayer. My mind wanders when I pray. I get impatient. I doubt. I don’t get the answers I want. People will tell me... Read more

Cézanne, Inventing Abstraction, and the Glen East Workshop

Last updated on: February 11, 2013 at 11:51 am By Daniel A. Siedell

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 the viewer to the world, to look at it closely and to feel it intensely, that opened the path toward abstraction—an approach to painting that... Read more