ruah arts group

As promised, I will comment more on things seen and heard at the Washington Arts Group Convocation…

There’s an intellectual nausea over a certain kind of sentimentality that creeps into the Christian art world. This was one of the pithy themes of Greg Wolfe’s opening talk. “Art is linked with prophecy,” he proclaimed. He went on to remind us that “Beauty always creates shock–a surprise, a flash of radiance…” He insisted that tragedy is an essential dimension of the Christian life.

We live in the shining shadow of the Holy Cross of Christ, and who are we to think he walked from Tabor straight to the Resurrection? Indeed, Christ is Risen. He is truly risen! However, it is the moral imperative in a fallen world to preach Christ and preach Him crucified. That is a brave prophecy–to portray in one’s own medium the wastelands of our time. I will take the darkest verse of T.S. Eliot over a thousand Thomas Kinkade pieces any day.

When we participate in His suffering willingly, and “dare to disturb the world” by portraying brokenness, we become prophets, not of doom, but of the the redemptive power of pain.