Apr
15
“Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet. It is a frightening thing to open oneself to this strange and dark side of the divine; it means letting go of our sane self-control, that control which gives us the illusion of safety. But safety is only an illusion, and letting it go is part of listening to the silence, and to the Spirit.”
- Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Mar
4
“How To Be a Poet”
Wendell Berry
(to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Feb
27
As I listen to the silence, I learn that my feelings about art and my feelings about the Creator of the Universe are inseparable. To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.
- Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
Feb
12
Three years ago, a friend of mine from way back in high school, now a high school English teacher, asked me to send her some book recommendations. I did, but I noticed that of the twenty-ish books I sent her, only one was fiction. It was hard to drum up fiction that I would recommend. Because I was then totally embedded in the doctoral dissertation writing process, that’s not too surprising, but it was a jolt to my system. I used to LOVE reading anything I could find, but it had been a while since I’d read anything that didn’t require a highlighter and a pencil and sticky tabs to remind myself of a bit of text that I would like to use later.
That jolt ignited in me a need to read again – to read for pleasure as well as for study. I had never really stopped, but the process of writing a dissertation marked a time that I knew that I had to read for pleasure again, or my brain would melt. So I got intentional. I started asking for recommendations for “real literature.” I started by looking at previous Pulitzer winners, then learned about other book awards. I read some of them, but I found other, better ways to get book recommendations for myself.
I found Goodreads, which helps me get book recommendations. I rediscovered the library as a source of books rather than just a remote office. I found book review podcasts.
I found that I was not just reading for pleasure, but also paying careful attention to how an author did what she or he did. I found that I was not just reading for pleasure, but also paying careful attention to how an author did what she or he did. I was mesmerized by the stark brown descriptions in The Road by Cormac McCarthy; I marveled at the way I entered into the mind of the autistic main character in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Last fall, while teaching a prayer class at the local seminary, I met a few people – Lauren foremost among them – who had a lit background and were working on that arts & culture intersection. That ignited a more intentional round of reading, which continues.
Here’s what I’ve remembered, or discovered: Good literature is about story. Often, it’s about The Story, it’s just cleverly hidden just underneath the surface. And usually – much liked Jesus’ use of parables to teach a deeper truth than the surface meaning might suggest – the story explodes on me with a profound sense of life which I wouldn’t get any other way.
I still read a lot of nonfiction with a highlighter and pencil and sticky tabs handy. But the creativity and whimsy of a good novel is a completely unique, and complementary, piece of my ongoing reading life.
I'm a software project manager and qa specialist by trade. I also hold a doctor of ministry degree and teach courses in Christian spirituality, both face-to-face and though e-learning systems. My doctoral dissertation looked at Christian spirituality in social networks. And I love to read.
Feb
10
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only only think what everyone else is thinking.
- Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Feb
6
Once in a while you can get shown the light /
in the strangest of places if you look at it right– Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, “Scarlet Begonias”
One of the things we need to figure out as we’re working in theology and literature is how we can connect them together. How can we pursue theology within literature, especially in “non-Christian” literature. Or are we stuck reading Christian fiction (horrified gasp)?
Paul Tillich’s 1959 book Theology of Culture collects essays regarding philosophy of religion and culture. In his essay “Aspects of a Religious Analysis of Culture,” he discusses the church’s role in contemporary culture. Rather than proposing hard boundaries between the Christian church and the culture in which it lives, Tillich stresses the church’s role as prophetic witness to the culture, as well as its need to hear corrective truth from the culture to itself. Refusing a clear separation between church and culture, Tillich uses the illustration of language used by church and culture. He argues, “The form of religion is culture. This is especially obvious in the language used by religion.” He notes that
“There is no sacred language which has fallen from a supranatural heaven and been put between the covers of a book. But there is human language, based on man’s encounter with reality, changing through the millennia, used for the needs of daily life, for expression and communication, for literature and poetry, and used for the expression and communication of our ultimate concern…. Religious language is ordinary language, changed under the power of what it expresses, the ultimate of being and meaning.”
So, Tillich argues that language is not secular or sacred. Only that of which language speaks, and the meaning it conveys, make it so. Tillich’s approach to theology and culture encourages to us a pursuit of Christian theology through the literature of contemporary culture, if we are attentive of the meaning and impact of work that we are reading.
Similarly, musician and theologian Jeremy Begbie makes this even clearer as he draws a helpful distinction between “theology for the arts” and “theology through the arts” in the following video produced by Duke University.
In theology for the arts, the goal is to try to understand music in the light of a theological worldview… In theology through the arts, the questions are, “what can music or the arts being to theology?” and “How can those particular powers of music help us unlock the great truths of the Gospel?”
I like this approach–the idea of pursuing theology through art. If I can see the beauty of God in a child’s laugh or a hummingbird’s wings or the view in an alpine wilderness, then I can also see it in other parts of creation. Like a song, or a poem, or a book. Whether that book is a story about a Hasidic Jew who paints, or about a zombie plague. Both may speak of calling and beauty and redemption and love.
I first learned these ideas from Jamie Howison, author of the (fantastic) book God’s Mind in That Music: Theological Explorations Through the Music of John Coltrane
I'm a software project manager and qa specialist by trade. I also hold a doctor of ministry degree and teach courses in Christian spirituality, both face-to-face and though e-learning systems. My doctoral dissertation looked at Christian spirituality in social networks. And I love to read.
Jan
29
I told Lauren that I wouldn’t post anything here until I finished a paper that I’m writing, but apparently I lied. Oops.
I’m working up a paper about how faith communities learn to discern together. Though the conference I’m submitting this for is a theological conference, I want to approach that subject through story. Specifically, though Chaim Potok’s Asher Lev stories, which have totally captured my imagination in recent months. In order to get some background help, I’ve been reading interviews with Potok, especially from a collection published as Conversations with Chaim Potok (University Press of Mississippi, 2000).
One of the major themes of My Name Is Asher Lev
In response to an interviewer’s question, “Is the artistic temperament from the sitra achra, the ‘other side’”?, Chaim Potok responded,
Yes, that is a fundamental question, and the first Asher Lev book [My Name is Asher Lev, 1972] deals with that. I think that art is from the “other side” but given to us to use with wisdom, beneficently, so that we can judge “this side.” There is nothing in the world that is as powerful an instrumentality as art; we can bring it to bear on the foolishness, the mendacity, the hypocrisy, and the hunger we have to create meaning in ourselves. So the artist has an enormous responsibility. I would agree with Asher Lev that he has the responsibility to do the best that he can within the realm of the “other side” in order to make “this side” a better place in which to live. But you’ve got to plumb the “other side”.
- from Conversations with Potok, 168-9. This is from “A Visit with Chaim Potok” by David L. Vanderwerken in 2000.
Potok is a writer (and also a painter), and in this response he gives us a challenge. How can we as writers and readers of literature and theologians bring that art to bear on our world? How can it help us to find and create meaning?
I am thrilled that this site allows us to ask this question, and I suspect that we will be dancing with this question for a long time ahead.
I'm a software project manager and qa specialist by trade. I also hold a doctor of ministry degree and teach courses in Christian spirituality, both face-to-face and though e-learning systems. My doctoral dissertation looked at Christian spirituality in social networks. And I love to read.
