May
1
So the arts are showing us [...] the possibilities of transformation. I think it’s one of the great contributions of the arts, that they can show us possibilities. They can show us how things could be, even in this world.
-Jeremy Begbie, musician and professor of theology at Duke
Apr
3
The language of communication may be the language of radio and television; but the language which the artist seeks sensitively to supervise is the language not of communication but of communion: it is that language into which an effort has been made to put a deep and authentic knowledge of what is involved in the life together of free men, and it is, therefore, a language which invites us to reenter what Martin Buber calls “the world of I and Thou.”
This is, of course, to say that the language of imaginative literature is not the ethically and spiritually neutral jargon of any science: it is, rather, a language which, if it is to do its proper work, needs to be heavily weighted with the beliefs, sentiments, and valuations that are the deep source in a culture of its “hum and buzz of implication” and that bind its people together with ties that separate them from the people of other cultures. Only when the artist’s language bears this kind of freight can it be something more than a vehicle of communication. Only then can it become an instrument of communion and–what all art is ultimately intended to be–a servant of love.
-Nathan A. Scott, Jr.’s The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature, pp. 3-4
Mar
27
But [William] Blake was not a great prophetic artist just because he managed to solve his personal problems through art. Prophetic artists don’t stop at the personal. What they do, you see, is solve something for everybody by making universally compelling images of their conflicts.
-Magda Danvers in Gail Godwin’s The Good Husband
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.