We evangelicals who care about the arts tend to operate in a hamster ball. Protected by our Christian worldview and our theologies of art and culture which fuel our work, we scurry about the artistic and cultural landscape able to apply our worldview and theology to everything we see. The fact that we see it gives us the illusion that that we’re in it, “engaging,” “transforming,” or being “faithfully present.” But the reality is that we are completely irrelevant and... Read more
Not even four minutes into the last presidential debate, Mitt Romney mentioned Mali as a terrorism hot spot. I was proud that I knew where Mali was, though had no idea something bad had happened there. As it turns out, according to a post by Morgan Lorraine Roach, after Muammar Qadhafi’s defeat in Libya last October, Tuareg rebels, once loyal to the regime, left Libya and returned to their homelands in Mali and Niger. In Mali, fighters equipped with arms looted... Read more
I know modern art can be strange and difficult. So, let’s spend a week this summer exploring it. I will be leading a week-long class on modern and contemporary art with the Glen Workshop, sponsored by IMAGE Journal. The workshop takes place June 10-17 at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA. In addition to my class, Lauren Winner will lead a workshop on sermon writing, Over the Rhine will lead one on song writing, and other workshops will... Read more
Guest blogger Dawn Duncan Harrell is author of Ten Ways to Pray. You can find her here and read more here. “So is evil a force like gravity, the propensity to serve self at the expense of the other, or a person that tempts and oppresses humans like Satan?” my fellow reader asked. We were sitting—she in a wheelchair—at a coffee shop discussing our fall book The Quest for the Historical Satan. It had been summer reading, but “st_ff happened.” And... Read more
Editor Note: Today’s Guest Post is by Doneila McIntosh. Doneila is completing her M.Div. at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, MN and is a wife and mother of two boys. A few nights ago, as my family was sitting down for dinner, my three year old Levi asked, “Mommy is Levi white?” As I hesitated to answer, he replied “everybody is white, Levi is brown.” At that moment I realized something: Levi had begun to articulate the racialization process that... Read more
The Nobel Prize for Physics last week went to two scientists who figured how to isolate quarks for the sake of study, and by way of application, for the sake of quantum computers, doing to classical computers what quantum theory did to classical physics. University of Rochester physics professor Adam Frank put it this way: Classical computers use “bits” of information that can be either 0 or 1. But quantum-information technologies let scientists consider “qubits,” quantum bits of information that... Read more
In addition to my weekly blog posts here at Cultivare, I am also contributing as a guest over at “Good Letters: Words Made Flesh,” a blog of IMAGE: A Journal of Art and Faith and hosted over at Patheos. You can read my second post,“Beyond the Image,” which explores what a painting is and is not. Read more
Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, Reina Sofia, Madrid “My kid can do that” is a common accusation leveled against modern artists whose paintings look nothing like the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, or a Thomas Kinkade print. As a museum curator I heard this numerous times. Modern art frustrates our presumptions of what art should be. We want artists to impress us with their powerful talent to render likeness, entertain us with images that “look real” (i.e., look like a... Read more
I was invited to give a chapel talk at Biola University in La Mirada, California in the spring of 2011. I spoke about how the book of Jonah is a story about us and them, revealing that the grace that God shows to the unrighteous infuriates those of us who think we are righteous. Unfortunately, this is the posture that we as evangelicals usually take in our approach to culture: us and them, the righteous and the unrighteous. And, let’s... Read more
Tomorrow I’m participating in a panel at Bethel University on Alzheimer’s Disease and the theology of human nature. As life expectancies increase, Alzheimer’s (and related dementia) is clearly becoming, not just a perplexing medical and scientific challenge, but a massive social and economic problem as well. Of course, for those suffering with dementia (and for their loved ones and caregivers), it is a tremendous relational and existential problem as well. And it raises all sorts of theological and ethical questions.... Read more
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