From Christmas to the Corpus Christi, the liturgical year keeps on reminding us about how the Word of God has assumed a human nature. We call this the “incarnation”, which means “to become flesh”. For at least two reasons, it…
Street art and the sacred might seem like an odd pairing at first blush. But for Artist and Methodist minister Ric Stott the act and activity of creating art in abandoned, almost desolate, spaces is one of creative hope. For…
If you think that Christianity is a cosmic drama and not merely a collection of private beliefs, that good theology should lead to faithful participation in this drama, and that God himself gets involved in the beautiful mess of this…
If you haven’t seen “Keep Calm and Carry On” or one of its variations over the past decade, you’ve missed a truly global phenomenon.[1] The propaganda poster, designed by the British Ministry of Information (MOI) in 1939, was distributed in…
The art of Robert Gober represents an immensely important body of work for testing the scope of contemporary art’s interrogation of kitsch. With his unique method, the unusual character of his work and the resultant effect that it has, Gober…
December 2011 found me in Munich. One evening I inched my way through the Christmas markets with their good humoured crowds, the gingerbread stars and Christmas trees, the locally carved wooden cribs, the Glühwein, the brass bands playing carols, the…
I had a friend in high school who had a bumpersticker on her car that read, “Warning: in case of rapture car will be unmanned.” I wasn’t theologically settled against a pretribution rapture at the time, and yet I found…
Good art opens the mind and emotions. It stretches one’s perspective, questions one’s beliefs, agitates apathy, and invites one to explore the mysterious. It can be, I believe, a manifestation of the sacred. Religious kitsch, on the other hand, with…
George R.R. Martin famously wrote in The Faces of Fantasy: Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of…