In the absence of the divine, can an image symbolise a higher reality? The visual language of Soviet prison tattoos and its use of religious symbols affords an interesting opportunity to answer this question. Indeed, what is absent from a…
There is a particular kind of difficulty within a painting which is at once entirely atheistic in vision and entirely dependent on Christian architecture for its power. Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, painted…
Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Phoenician Scheme (2025), is replete with religious imagery. Crucifixes, white-winged angels, and cloudy depictions of a kitsch heaven imbue the film with a religious tone that invites theological interpretation. In conducting this analysis, this article…
Musical loci of pilgrimage–such as Elvis Presley’s Graceland, the Beatles’ Abbey Road zebra crossing, or Jim Morrison’s grave at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris–constitute a well-known phenomenon, extensively documented by both music fans and journalists. Since the 1980s, they…
Picture the scene: a gospel choir in bright green and pink robes comes out onto the stage to a luxurious piano and synth vamp, and one member of the choir steps out to begin singing. ‘I believe I found the…
In an editorial for Esquire in 1985, the same year Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) died, the American novelist John Updike said of fiction that it is ‘nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has…
‘Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children’.1 So begins the fairy-tale preface to The Lost Words, written by Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Jackie Morris. The preface alludes to the 2007 edition of the…
To kick off our autumn series on Religion from the Outside, icon writer Aidan Hart assesses the line of influence — and natural divergences — between Orthodox iconography and the work of Romanian sculptor and painter Constantin Brancusi and Russian…
Last week, we learned that Wendell Berry had entered into fellowship with the ‘dead [that] that are alive’.1 I spent the past year reading his work for my master’s dissertation, which explored imagination and sabbath through the lens of his…