Spring is undoubtedly a season of rebirth, but in springtime,
especially early, we also discover a tension between hope
and our human tendency to despair that will shape us if we
let it. Before gardens rise from the
dirt, seeds must first die in burial.
Before Christ rose from the tomb, he had to be stricken,
smitten, and afflicted. Before Easter comes Lent, and
even as God makes all things new, we must still journey on,
often through pain and suffering.
Where do stories and songs and art fit into all this?
Should they be positive and encouraging, giving us a
sentimental escape? Or should they portray the harsh
reality of life as it appears to be, disregarding hope if the
artist doesn't feel it? A couple weeks ago, the Anselm
Society partnered with the NICAEA Study Center, a Christian
study center active in Colorado Springs, to host an event
exploring this question. You can learn more about the
Nicaea Study Center at the end of this episode.
We recorded the event to share with you.
As a bonus episode on the podcast, we were delighted to
host our friend Wesley Vanderlucht from Gordon Conwell
Theological Seminary to give this talk.
Doctor Vanderlucht is the author of Beauty is Oxygen, Finding a
Faith that Breathes. He teaches theology and is the
acting director of the Leighton Ford Center for Theology, the
Arts and Gospel Witness at Gordon Conwell.
Dr. Vanderlucht also Co founded the organization Kinship Plot,
which is a community dedicated to uplifting, resonant
relationships. Doctor Vanderlucht has served in
many ministry roles and is an advocate for beauty and the
arts. He is a kindred spirit and a
friend to the Anthem Society. We were very excited to have him
with us. I hope this talk is as
strengthening for you as it was for us.
Well, good evening everyone. I'm so glad you're here.
And I think that pie, whether the mathematical formula or the
edible dessert, is a beautiful thing to celebrate.
So I think it's entirely fitting.
I love it and even though I I've just recently written on beauty,
I'm not really talking about that tonight directly.
I heard about this theme of hope and despair and dialogue with
Brad some and and so looking more specifically at the issue
of hope and artistry, gritty hope and the gift of art from
sentimentality to you, catastrophe.
And I think you'll hear some bits about beauty in there, even
if I'm not addressing it directly.
And of course, we can go anywhere you want to go in the
questions. In 2015, American journalist and
writer Tanahisi Coates wrote a powerful book called Between the
World and Me, which won the National Book Award and was a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In the book, which is written in
the form of a letter to his son, Coates issues a warning against
any art that tries to provide what he calls specious hope,
particularly given what it's like to inhabit a body of color
in the United States. And Coates argues that it's the
responsibility of an artist to look unflinchingly at reality
and then present it in a way that connects with others and
resonates with others. In an article called Hope and
the Artist, The Virtues of Enlightenment over Feel Good
ISM, which was published in The Atlantic in 2015, Coates
challenges the notion that artists should in any way aim at
providing hope. By contrast, he argues that the
primary goal of art is enlightenment, which he
describes as the rendering of dead stats into something
touchable. Coats doesn't actually fault any
artists for seeking to express hope, if that feeling is
authentic and genuine. But he then delivers a warning
against any artist that is oriented toward hope as a goal.
Here's what he writes, he says hope for hope's sake, hope as
tautology. Hope because hope, hope because
I said so, is the enemy of intelligence.
One can say the same about the opposite pull of despair.
Neither neither of these, hope or despair, are wrong.
They each reflect human sentiment, much like anger,
sadness, Lovejoy. Art that uses anything, any of
these, to say something larger interests me.
Art that takes any of these as its aim does not.
The Burgers of Calais doesn't need to smile for me.
And I don't need Macbeth to be a fairy tale.
Even our fairy tales are rarely fairy tales.
So that's Tommy Heely Coats. That's his challenge that he has
levied against people, like people of faith, who are
oriented toward hope. And so how do we respond to
Coats? How should artists of faith,
artists for whom hope is essential as faith and love are?
How do we respond to Coats's thesis that art should not aim
at hope? And to what extent is hopeful
art, however you might define that, the enemy of intelligence?
When does hopeful art degenerate into sentimental art?
And can you be a serious artist and still love fairy tales?
That's what we're going to get. But I want to begin with an
agreement with Coats. I resonate totally with Coats
concern that art oriented toward specious hope.
It's an important qualifier. Superficial hope can easily and
does often become the enemy of enlightenment and a feel good
opiate for spiritually inclined masses.
Now an all too easy target. I think often for over
sentimentalized, so so-called hopeful art is the paintings of
late American artist Thomas Kincaid, widely known as the
painter of light. Kincaid's stated purpose was to
bring light into people's lives and to help them feel good.
Whatever his actual motives, making people feel good is a
really good business plan, and Kincaid once explained that the
success of his paintings lies from his goal, to quote, portray
a world without the fall, a world without evil, a world with
nothing to elicit anxiety. Or if you don't know Kincaid,
take the 2013 song Happy by Pharrell Williams.
He wrote that for Despicable Me Two, and it's sore to the top of
the charts. I think my latest check is that
the music video has been viewed more than 1.4 billion times on
YouTube. And so the video and the follow
up project, 24 Hours of Happy, which is super addicting.
By the way, don't start watching 24 Hours of Happy it.
It just features people of all shapes and sizes and locations
around the world dancing to his song, dancing the whole song, I
should say around the clock for 24 hours And and the video is
infectious. But the more you you watch it,
the more you can begin to actually believe what it says,
which is happiness is the truth and can't nothing bring me down.
But in the real world we live in, is this some kind of joyful
resistance or is it sentimentality gone wild?
Back when Twitter was a thing, someone tweeted something about
Farrell's song, how he hated it, and Farrell retweeted that with
one word. Same.
And that exploded the social media spheres, and people
started admitting their annoyance and dislike of the
song, arguing in the threads that it's emotionally
simplistic, it's sonically boring, it's lyrically naive.
In other words, it's classic sentimentality.
And it may make you feel good for a while, but it doesn't
stick like a sugar rush. So the world of Kincaid
paintings, Feral song. It's not the world we live in,
right? It's not the world experienced
viscerally, be it by Coates and his son, nor the world
experienced by Kincaid, who died at the age of 54 from acute
intoxication, nor the world experienced by Feral, whose
cousin was shot and killed by Virginia police.
And and this kind of sentimentalized art fails by
Coats's rule or standard to make our actual world touchable.
And while some may argue that enjoying a Kincaid landscape or
singing along to happy, which I've done, I admit it, it's
fine, can get your mind off trouble and maybe even get your
mind on the reality of God and his promised future.
But even in that reality, Christ still has wounds.
Even in that reality, there still exists what poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins called a pied beauty.
This reality is not all light and shallow happiness.
It incorporates, as Hopkins writes in his poem, pied beauty.
All things counter, original, spare, strange, whatever is
fickle, freckled, who knows how, With sweet, slow, sweet sour
dazzle. A dim he fathers forth whose
beauty is past change. Praise him.
And who are we really to improve on this cosmic pied beauty, The
undulating contrast of dappled things, the interplay between
light and shadow. So whatever hopeful art is, it
must be something more than just a landscape of light in which
happiness is the truth. The Christian philosopher and
art critic Calvin Sayreveld once wrote this in reference to
sentimentalized art. This is from his wonderful book
A Christian Critique of Art and Literature Committed to You.
He says all such sincere Sunday schoolish artificial projects
are pseudo Christian and they're innocuous presentations, not
only devastate understanding art, but also misrepresent and
take the bite and the grit and the life out of our Christian
commitment. Artists who approach their
making from a Christian commitment, in other words,
should be alert to what Jeremy Begby calls the pathologies of
sentimentality. So Begby leads the initiative
and Theology in the Arts at Duke University.
He identifies 3 primary pitfalls of sentimentality of this
pathology #1 is misrepresenting or evading evil #2 is placating
the emotions, and #3 is avoiding costly action.
I want to look at those a little bit in light of how art can
avoid those errors and move us toward a more gritty hope.
Let's take that first pitfall. Sentimental art flirts with or
explicitly goes about evading or trivializing evil.
Good art should not ignore, like a Thomas Kincaid painting, that
we live in this world, this fallen, groaning, broken world.
Good art does not naively assume that all human beings are
basically good, and society is inevitably moving toward greater
harmony and justice. The role of art, good art, as
Emily Dickinson says, is to tell all the truth and tell its
slants, which includes slant truth telling about the struggle
between good and evil that constitutes the drama of history
and all of our lives. Art tells slant the truth and
reality of cosmic struggle, personal sins, systemic evil.
Art can tell all that truth slant while at the same time
bearing witness to hope the same way the Scriptures do.
Telling truth about the insanity of our sin, the flourishing of
injustice, the meaninglessness of life under the sun, while
also bearing witness to a God who took on our sin and ended
the curse and defeated death. A God who loves us and is
subversively and surely making all things new, including people
like you and me. So God is making all things new
in Christ by the Spirit. And yet the world is not
currently remade. The hope we have, therefore,
cannot be naive nor sentimental. We have hope, yes, but it's a
hope that takes seriously our personal and cosmic cries for
healing and for justice, all of which can and should be
expressed through our art. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote,
in the midst of the Nazi regime, the only one who cries out for
the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.
I think he's stating that very wisely.
And the difficulty and urgency of telling truth slant about the
the ruinous glory of the world, the Sinner St. quality of our
lives is precisely why we need artists.
The vocation of artists is to tell all the truth, but tell it
slant elusively, imaginatively, holistically.
Whereas didactic presentations of truth textbooks, textbook
statements about the intermingling of evil and hope,
I think have a harder time holding on to or holding
together the paradox and and some of the tensions of the
gritty and the glorious. But the gift of art is the
ability to tell all the truth until it's slant in a way that
get gets behind some of our natural defenses and moves us
and transforms us. To quote again from Cervelt,
biblically true arts will show the hurt and the laughter, the
thorough, going kiaroscuro to flowers and desires and prayers
alike. It will let a childlike gladness
of hope well up through the total groaning of all creation
for the great day still to come. So you have a poet like Gerard
Manley Hopkins, one of my favorites, who can in literally
in one breath almost be telling slant the truth of hurt and also
the truth of hope the same time. So you get a couple lines like
from his poem God's Grandeur. Generations have trod, have
trod, have trod, and all is seared with trade, bleared,
smeared with toil, and wears man's smudge and shares man's
smell. The soil is bare now, nor can
feet feel being shot. And then right into the slant.
Truth of hope. And for all this nature is never
spent there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.
And though the last lights off the black W went oh, morning at
the brown brink eastward springs.
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm
breasts and with, ah, bright wings.
He's doing both at the same time.
So I think a poem like that is the kind of art that bears
witness to hope, but not in a way that evades evil or is is
falling prey to sentimentality. This is not hope for hope's
sake, hope as tautology, Hope because hope as Coats warns
about. It's hope that emerges through
the Crucible of trotting, trotting, trotting, and
everything being smeared and and and seared so good art can
witness not merely to a feel Good Hope, but to a gritty 1.
Only art that expresses A specious hope, as Coates calls
it, will be emotionally self indulgent.
That's the second trap of sentimentality.
Art that taps into true hope is hope that is deep and it's
thick, which has the power not only to elicit emotions, to
expose our emotions, but actually to heal and even
reshape them. And this will only be the case
if we view hope as something that includes but is more than
mere human sentiment. This is a key point thinking,
interacting with anyone who doesn't share this this
imaginary. In Coates's article about hope
and the artist, he identifies hope and despair as opposite
poles on the spectrum of human sentiment.
I don't think they fit equally on that spectrum.
He affirms that if an artist genuinely feels any of these
things, then, well, it's fitting to express them.
And I think he's right about that if we're talking about
feeling. But feeling hopeful, I believe,
is different then receiving the gift of hope and seeking to bear
witness to that gift through art.
From a Christian perspective, hope is less of a feeling than
it is a revelation. A revelation of a new future,
the gift of a new story to inhabit, a new identity to
embrace. And and so hope is a it's a holy
spirited, gifted confidence. So feeling is involved in a God
who has promised to make all things new, even in the midst of
feeling lament and sorrow and despair and everything else.
And so seen in that way, hope as a gift, not just as sentiment,
art can witness to hope and not merely make us feel good, but
actually has the potential to reshape us emotionally, to give
us the capacity to feel the fullness of human emotion,
including both grief for what is and joy for what will be.
I mentioned Jeremy Bagby. He's he's a composer and a
musician and a theologian. I commend his work to you.
In in his book Resounding Truth, he writes about the particular
power of of music to voice not only what we currently feel, but
even what we could or perhaps should feel.
He writes, is this not what Bob Dylan did for a whole generation
in the 1960s? Is this not what we shall
overcome did for thousands in the civil rights struggle?
It changed those who sang it. It helped them find fresh hope
and courage. And is this not what the
greatest hymns do? They not only help us sing what
we already experienced emotionally.
To some extent, they also educate and reform our emotional
experience. Now, of course, singing about
what we already experience is a beautiful and wonderful thing as
well, and part of the gift of of art.
Giving expression to human experience, including giving
expression to pain, to trauma. It's a necessary part of
actually developing gritty hope, and it's a part of the gift of
art that out of the bentness of suffering we get the bent notes
of the Blues right out of a sense of God forsakenness, we
get psalms of lament. So expressing pain can begin the
process of healing and developing and clinging to a
kind of weighty gritty hope. And there's a powerful scene in
the film 12 Years a Slave. Has anyone seen this film?
I think illustrates this really well.
It's a film that tells a story about about Solomon, who's
kidnapped in the North. He was forced to be a slave for
12 years in Mississippi. And you know, without a doubt,
his emotional life. It's fear, it's anger, it's
desperation, it's depression. Hope had literally been beaten
out of him. But in the midst of all that
pain and suffering, there's this really moving scene where we see
the enslaved community gathering to sing these these songs of
lament mixed in with hope. Songs like Roll Jordan Roll, and
which through their melodies and lyrics and repetition, it's
slowly coaxing Solomon to sing out of his pain and toward hope.
I think that's what a lot of really good art does move us to
to express our pain toward an emotion we don't yet have,
toward a reality in which we don't even yet live.
And if art can express hope in a way that does not evade evil,
but tells all the truth, slant. And if heart art can express
hope in a way that avoids emotional self indulgence in
order to engage and shape the fullness of our emotional life,
then this kind of hopeful art will be well poised to dodge
that third pitfall of sentimentality, failure to
generate costly action. Sometimes the very activity of
art making and art appreciating is accused of being negligent.
Have you heard this argument before?
That art distracts us from the real work of justice and loving
our neighbor and mercy and compassion.
So the objection is that art is essentially it's a waste of time
and money. It's like fiddling while Rome
burns. And of course, some art does
that. Some art can wall us into
apathy, cause us to remain, I think, tragically disconnected
with the way things really are from costly action.
But often art that that does that has already fallen into the
two, the first two pitfalls that it's ignoring reality and it's
placating our emotions. OK.
By contrast, the art has had the art that has the courage to make
reality touchable while alluding to the possibility of reality
remade has an essential role to play in any movement for change
in our lives. Personal transformation, social
justice. Whatever the case may be, art
has the power to help us imagine a new reality, which can then
motivate our individual and collective action, even within
situations that that may seem hopeless.
In his book Christianity, Arts and Transformation, South
African theologian John Degrucci makes a compelling case for the
necessity of hope and arts in the face of injustice.
The power of arts to to bear witness to that hope.
So, he writes, this hope is about the production of a new
reality for a damaged society. This is a far cry from an easy
optimism about the future, but it is also a refusal to succumb
to despair. Hope alone provides the vision
and dynamic for a dynamic social praxis.
During the struggle against apartheid, keeping hope alive
was of the essence. To lose hope was to surrender
the power to bring about change, and the same remains true for
the process of social hearing and transformation.
In a post apartheid era, keeping hope alive is universally one of
the most urgent demands of our time.
As in the need to offer alternative ways of conceiving
reality and how we envision the future.
And that's his bridge to talk about the arts, goes on to
explain how artistic creativity, any kind of creativity, even
when it doesn't have hope as its primary aim, can be indicative
of hope simply because it's making something new out of the
reality that is. So he writes, this artistic
creativity can never be satisfied with Nietzsche's
nihilism, even when it despairs of the world.
For it is of the essence of creativity that it continually
imagines new futures as it seeks to transcend the cul de sacs of
the past. Hope enables us to transgress
boundaries of what is presently deemed realistic and possible.
Another theologian, Wendy Farley, puts it this way.
The very act of creation is a refusal to accept tragedy as
final. Creativity, perhaps
paradoxically, allows us to grieve and lament even as it
testifies by its very existence to the remnant that survives.
And that's the dynamic that TA Nehisi Coates misses, that even
when an artist is not intending to communicate anything hopeful,
the very act of making something new challenges despair.
A work of art encounters us with new mixtures of sounds, new
combinations of colors, new sequences of words, new
amalgamations of movements. And human artistry is never
creation out of nothing, creation X nihilo, but it's
creation out of anything, creation X aliquo, a fashioning
of something new, anything new out of what currently is.
And art is therefore a testimony to the possibility of newness.
No matter what, Artistry is a living, breathing alternative to
ultimate tragedy. You might be familiar with the
story of Vedron Smelovich, cellist who gained notoriety for
playing Albinones Adagio and G Minor in the ruins of a downtown
Sarajevo market following a brutal attack.
And what made him notorious in playing that adagio is that he
didn't just play it once, but he played it over and over for 22
consecutive days. And as one writer puts it,
straddling debris balanced between wreckage, he drew his
bow and filled those aching ruins with music.
He's not denying the existence of suffering and death, but he
divide defied death with a song. He showed how something new
could arise out of the wreckage. And that engenders hope.
That's what the arts can do. The arts are a gift for our
battered lives because they help us to imagine new possibilities,
help us at least begin to wonder what if?
What if, you know, when Jesus began his public ministry,
declaring good news, providing hope to those weary from
centuries of waiting, battered by the Roman Empire?
His preferred method of communication, stories, images,
metaphors, Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, like yeast,
like a hidden treasure, like a net, like a banquet with the
most unlikely people and and by using this artful form of
communication, Jesus is helping his hearers imagine the now and
not yet reality of God's presence in Kingdom.
He is telling slant the truth of God's Kingdom through stories
and images, helping listeners in every culture.
Now imagine a new economy, a new reality, a new family in which
the last are first and the first are last.
And so, as we inhabit these stories, we are invited to
imagine a new Kingdom emerging within the shadow of empire,
heaven and earth merging, beginning now and on into
eternity. Art can reveal the the
brokenness and get us in touch with all that needs to be
restored, and then surprise us with delight and remind us of
our deepest longings. There were some who listened to
Jesus parables, both then and now, that dismissed them as mere
fairy tales, nice stories, little or no bearing to reality.
And to circle back to Coats's words or his question, can't we
just do away with fairy tales? At the same time?
There's a tender moment in In Between the World and Me, his
book, where he wonders if he's missing something in Speaking of
his distance from the church, he writes.
I often wonder if in that distance, I've missed something,
some notion of cosmic hope, some wisdom beyond my mean physical
perception of the world, Something beyond the body that I
might have transmitted to you, my son.
And I just wonder, what if the something that Coats could have
transmitted to his son was the gift of fairy tales?
Fairy tales that exist not because of wishful thinking and
sentimental thoughts, but because good endings are just as
real, if not more real than tragic ones.
And if that's true, then fairy tales introduce us to the way
things really are. Broken, yes, but capable of
repair beyond what we can actually imagine.
They introduced us to the possibility of you catastrophe,
that wonderful world word I'm finally getting to in the
subtitle of my talk tonight, You catastrophe.
From sentimentality to you catastrophe did not invent that
word. I wish I had.
It's a great word comes from the writer JRR Tolkien, author of
Beloved Lord of the Rings. And he uses that word, you
catastrophe, to describe the nature of fairy tales, to move
through catastrophe to a good and happy ending.
And in doing so, Tolkien argues that fairy tales are not an
escape from reality. It's key to his argument.
But they're actually an introduction to primary reality,
the one true story, a story that is propelled by grace and will
end with the joyous transformation of tragedy into
comedy. He has this delightful little
essay called on fairy stories. I'll just read a paragraph, he
says. The consolation of fairy
stories, the joy of the happy ending, or more correctly, of
the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous turn.
For there is no true end to any fairy tale.
This joy, which is one of the things which fairy stories can
produce supremely well, is not essentially escapist or fugitive
in its fairy tale or other world setting.
It is a sudden and miraculous grace never to be counted on to
recur. It does not deny the existence
of this catastrophe, sorrow and failure.
The possibility of these is actually necessary to the joy of
deliverance. It denies, in the face of much
evidence, if you will, universal final defeat.
And in so far is Evangelion, A fleeting glimpse of joy, joy
beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
And he's talking about the kind of art he's trying to create as
he's writing Lord of the Rings. Yes, it's art that brings us in
touch with reality, but it's also art that gives us a picture
of what could be that includes within its space for for sudden
and miraculous grace for you, catastrophe.
And I think one of the reasons why Lord of the Rings is so
powerful and so popular, frankly, is because it's the
kind of art that can truly inspire us and give us gritty
hope which will last and actually enable us to persevere
even when things feel hopeless and to maintain hope in that
ultimate new catastrophe when God will make all things new.
And we need that today more than ever.
And so I just want to close today with some some wise words
from a biblical theologian, NT right, who beautifully ties
together some of these themes and shows how art can provide
gritty hope. The Christian contribution to
the world of the arts is therefore neither to collapse
into sentimentality, to murmur the easy half truths which
comfort for a while, but wither in the face of the horror of the
world, nor to connive at that brutalism which under the guise
of telling it like it is. That's Coats denies the very
possibility of hope. The Christian contribution to
the arts must lie along the line of listening to the longing and
groaning of creation, a longing which is itself multi
dimensional because it is the evidence of the spirits groaning
and longing within the world and expressing and portraying that
longing both in its present agony and in its certain hope.
Thanks. All right.
So we have some time for questions.
So I, I think this is how it's supposed to work.
If you have a question, raise your hand and I'll come racing
over to you with the microphone so everybody can hear the
question. So go.
Kind of strike while the iron's hot.
You use the word slant in a way that I have not heard before.
I wondered if you could kind of help me with that.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm still on.
Right. Yeah.
OK. So, yeah, tell all the truth,
but tell. It's slant that comes from Emily
Dickinson's poem where she's talking about it's a defense of
her poetry, but it's a defense of all artistry because she says
that there is a certain success that ends circuit lies because
she says the truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.
So there's a sense of if truth is presented to us directly and
This is why Jesus taught in parables.
It's just like this is exactly what's going to happen when it's
going to happen. There would have been an
immediate rejection of that. You know, natural defenses go
up, but also there wouldn't have been the kind of genuine
reception that happens when you come into a story, when you
start contemplating an image and you have an aha moment, you
know, So this is David as he's listening to the prophet explain
the story about a man's best loved sheep and it was taken and
slaughter. And he's like, how dare he?
That man must be killed, right? He's got him in the story.
He's like, that's you, bro. That's what Telling Truth Slant
does, is it gets us involved in a way that we are either going
to have to reject it or receive it.
And that was the response to Jesus Parables.
Yep. Hey, so you know, I agree with
you, but I'm wondering if you think that sometimes art that is
simple and basic and basically still based in Eden.
You know what I mean? Like the dumb sitcom, the just
ridiculous little picture of a bird.
If there isn't justification sometimes for art that hasn't
experienced the fall yet, because we've experienced the
fall and we just need a little break.
Do you know what I mean? So, yeah.
What do you think of that? Yeah.
For sure, No, absolutely. A couple of things I want to say
about that one. One is not all art needs to do
everything, you know, and some artists are particularly gifted
to enter the big one true story at a certain point.
Sometimes it's the goodness of creation.
They're really good at portraying that.
Sometimes it's the brokenness of the world, sometimes
transformation or whatever the case may be.
And you know, so, so that's something to consider.
And also, I think, yeah, it's, it's OK to just have a break in
the Daydream. You know, I think the, the
vision I was trying to put forth is the, the overall role of
Christians in the arts. Like what, what can we make
that's a unique contribution? And I think it's telling the
whole story and telling the whole story slant.
But there may be times because not all one artist can do it all
and artists have different gifts to, to not focus on the whole
and just take a little part. And it's the goodness of bird
song, you know, that's great. I was in in Nashville just a
couple days ago, and there was an exhibit, this wonderful
artist whose name I'm forgetting in the moment.
But she has just taken these little parchments that she made
and made marks in them as she's listening to birds and as a
record of her attentiveness to birdsong that has just a
lightness to it, you know, that draws you to the beauty of that.
But, you know, her art should exist along other art that
illumines other aspects of reality in other parts of the
story. Yeah.
Good. Is there a responsibility that
we all have to be participants in, in creating beauty in
different forms? There's there's a lot of, you
know, the the idea of developing good tastes of recognizing
goodness and beauty when we see it and and celebrating it,
admiring it may be commending it to others, but given thank you
for your talk tonight, by the way, but given what you said
tonight, is there is there something that comes out of
this? It's almost a duty for us to
even just attempt to create beauty.
Yeah, absolutely, 100%. Yeah.
So every single human being is creative.
We are made in the image of a maker to make things.
And our making should follow the pattern of of God's making, you
know, And I love how Dorothy Sayers talks about it in her
wonderful book, Mind of the Maker.
It's like we're all we're all created in God's image to make
things. Could be a spreadsheet, could be
a Symphony, could be a garden, you know, could be, could be a
wonderful painting. And we all have ideas for things
to create. We all have certain gifts doing
this because she talks about it as the triangle of the Trinity.
So we all have the idea to create things and activity or
energy to bring them into the world and inspiration to do so
that also inspires others. And that our ideas and our
making and the power of those things should be oriented to
truth and goodness and beauty, you know, and should.
That's how they give glory to God and, and are good for the
world and our neighbors. So could be absolutely anything,
but we all are participating in the story in that way.
Yeah. Good evening.
My name is Mac Pitt. Thank you so much for your talk
tonight. It's been wonderful.
So I am a, a college student. I'm studying theater.
I'm actually also studying communication.
So don't worry, I will be making money.
I, I attend a Christian university and part of our
theater department have been involved in a lot of shows.
And one of the, the points that has come up throughout my time
at this particular university is that we will come up with ideas
for shows that you want to do, shows that have been written.
And there's a lot of pushback from our, our Christian
community, from leadership within our school saying that
the Christian message is not Christian enough.
That to the, the art that we are trying to portray does not have
a, an inherent Christian message.
And in spite of argument, there is a, there's, there's just a
bit of a disconnect there. So just what your thoughts are
on that as far as being in Christian community and what
does portrayal of art look like? I sigh because it's very common
as you know, and unfortunately, I just think when when truth is
the leading filter for the kind of art we produce often
sacrifices beauty and excellence and the slantness that makes art
art, you know, So try to cast a vision for, you know, there's of
course, art always has a message.
Sometimes it's more discernible than other times.
And sometimes that indiscernibility that in the
uncontainability of the truth of the artwork is actually it's
gift because it keeps us exploring.
It ushers us into a reality which is more of a mystery
rather than something that we can explain in bullet points to
someone, you know. So now I get needing to make
choices about what's being staged or screened or read,
given the fittiness of of the community.
And, you know, so often it's just very contextual.
And depending on the context, I think it's important to gently
push toward a a more robust, like truth, goodness, and beauty
approach to the kind of artwork we're engaging with.
I'd like to know what you think about satire and its role in
creativity. I I when you talked about Thomas
Kincaid, I think of this, this image I saw one time of like a
like a very picturesque Thomas Kincaid landscape and then like
a stormtrooper sky. Yeah, Yeah.
Star Wars. I've seen that too.
Coming in and like, you know, battling down and there's a real
truth to that. But also like the Babylon Bee
and other other satirists and interested in what you think of
that. Yeah, it's, it's wonderful
because it makes strange the familiar.
It's what satire does so well. And, and I think a lot of the
best art, whether it's satire or not, is presenting to us with a
sort of unfamiliar familiarity. Like, Oh yeah, I have that
conversation in the grocery store all the time.
And I've never noticed how absurd that is or how wonderful
it is, you know, and, and also, I think the other gift of satire
is just complexifying reality a bit.
So someone may say something and it means like 1010 different
things. And some of those things are
difficult. Some of them are funny, some of
them are ridiculous, you know. So I think it's one of the
wonderful ways of telling truth slants and not taking ourselves
too seriously as well, which is important importance of not
being to earnest. Hi, thank you so much for
spending your evening with us. I was glancing at your book,
Beauty is Oxygen and the unique aspect that you bring of having
a little O where we're supposed to stop and breathe.
And your talk tonight made me wonder.
And maybe you didn't mean this metaphor to go this far, so I
apologize. But if beauty is oxygen, then
what would you say would be kind of carbon dioxide to our world?
Like, would you say it's sort of that sentimentality and despair
or something to that effect? And also my daughter has a
question. Oh, wonderful.
Go ahead. What's the most beautiful pie
I've ever seen and what made it beautiful?
Beautiful pie or play pie. I love that.
I'm going to start with the easy question, which is growing up,
my mom made these apple pies in the brown paper bag in the oven
and stutch apple pie that I grew up having and most beautiful pie
I've ever tasted. It didn't always look so good,
but it tasted really good. You know, I've never really
thought too much about the carbon dioxide part of it.
I've I've thought about how beauty is oxygen, not perfume.
Thought a lot about that because it's not merely nice and
subjective and something for the privileged, you know, but carbon
dioxide, I think it would be in anything that we are taking in
in the world. There's going to be the oxygen
part of it and there's a part of it that we don't need.
I mean, because nothing is purely beautiful except God.
So I think, and maybe this is part of.
Sorry, what was your name again? Theater student.
Yeah. So maybe part of the
encouragement too, in engaging with plays and films and such
that aren't Christian, that have difficult content.
Is there some things in that we need to exhale and not keep
meditating on, not keep as a part of our formation and
discipleship journey, But it is coming to us with things that
are truly beautiful that we need to take in.
So I think, I think probably I would go in the direction of
discernment with that. OK, I'm going to think about it
more. So we have time for one more
question. I see your hand.
But as Piper has reminded us, there is π to be had and
conversation to be had. So we'll do one more question,
you know, and then π. You have this triangle around
art of truth, goodness and beauty.
Would you mind defining what you mean by goodness and beauty?
For I understand them to be kind of the same thing.
Good things are beautiful and and beautiful things are good.
So what exactly do you mean? Sure.
Well, something that frustrates some people when they read
beauty as oxygen is I don't really define beauty because,
you know, beauty is the overflow of who God is.
How are you going to define that?
And, but I think it, it is a good way of what you're
beginning to say of truth, goodness and beauty, that they
are one in a, in the sense that Father, son and spirit are one.
And that you, you might say that beauty is the splendor of God.
And, you know, truth is the integrity of God and goodness is
the, you know, it's the orientation of, of God toward
love. You know, so, so there's a
relationship between all of them.
But I, I'm so passionate that I think a lot of times we have
taken a truth first or a goodness first approach toward
various things in life. And a beauty first approach is
just normally kind of how we live.
Like we're encountered by something first, the shape of
it, you know, the form of it, the splendor of it.
And through beauty, we are drawn to goodness and truth.
Could we thank Doctor Vanderluck one more time?
Thanks, Ed. So if you're like me, you have
an instinct, an instinct that that tells you exactly where the
pie is and it won't be a problem to find.
If you're not like me, it's through the doors and then down
the stairs. You could also just wait and
find the instinctive pie people and just kind of follow them.
But it will be out that way. But on behalf of the Ansem
Society and then I see a study center, we want to thank you for
coming out. Enjoy some pie, some beautiful
pie.