ruah arts group

My husband and I just got back from the Christian Arts Conference in DC not too long ago. It was a breathless two days: twelve plenary speakers, thirty five breakout session leaders, dozens of artists and hundreds of participants. Though it was a smaller scale convocation–as conferences go–it was an intense couple of days. The title was “Jumping out of the Self-Referential Box,” and the inspiration was the Holy Trinity as our reference point for unity and diversity in a society of sameness. It was a brilliant, albeit lofty theme, but the schools of thought began to separate themselves fairly quickly. The burning question, although not directly broached, was one of liturgy. This question is of course rooted in ecclesiology. And what a bunch we had to tackle that topic! Ranging from “new paradigm” transdenominational Tony Jones of the Emergent Village (they dare not use “church”) to Evangelical Louis Markos (or was he Catholic–you be the judge) and Eric Metaxas to Orthodox Frederica Matthewes-Greene to the Catholic super-team of Tom Howard, Stratford Caldecott, Joseph Pearce, David Clayton, Gregory Wolfe and Fr. Basil Cole (and several others), the conversation was joyfully engaging at times, passive aggressive at other times and, in on at least one occasion quite aggressive. What fires! In the next week or two I’ll be posting on specific speakers and my takes on their talks. The fruit of the conference, and the point of the whole thing not only the static topic of liturgy in an academic sense, but the dynamic reality that, in fact, “The fine arts were born on the altar.”