All Saints Presbyterian Church

Beauty and Desecration

What was the first experience of beauty you remember?

When a friend asked me the question years ago, my first answer was “I grew up in Alabama. We didn’t have any beauty!.” But that would be wrong. Even in the small town South, beauty (in the form of music for me) made its mark.

According to Roger Scruton, later generations may have quite a different answer. In an earlier time Scruton would have been described as an iconoclast: a rebel, a radical, a dissenter from the established order. But as he smashes icons in the name of the most traditional of ideas in his role as professor of philosophy in Oxford and Washington, today he is a mere conservative, albeit an erudite, eloquent one. In the spring 2009 edition of City Journal he tackles modern art in his essay “Beauty and Desecration”.

“At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them… At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes.”

What has been the result of these changes? According to Scruton, the “desecration” of art.

Josh Welker at CRL - Opening Reception this Saturday

The Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin presents Terrain, an exhibition showcasing the work of three designers and eight studio artists completing their Master of Fine Arts degrees. Terrain features the work of Alec Appl, Jonathan Aseron, Beth Ferguson, Bonnie Gammill, Laura Kinneberg, Tahila Shireem Chavez Mintz, Teruko Nimura, Cecelia Phillips, Steven Spears, Joshua Welker, and Joseph Winchester.

You may recognize Josh as the guy who plays occasional bass in the worship band, or as Michelle’s husband, or as the father of that little boy who dances to all the hymns at church (Frederik). He’s also a sculptor, a printmaker, and a painter who’s about to finish up his MFA.  About his work, he writes:

“My approach to art making aligns with my concept of humanity. I see both as fundamentally dependent upon community.... An object, like a civilization, must be placed and confronted in a particular context in order to understand its depths, its glories and its tragedies.”

Come see for yourself starting this weekend. 

Opening Reception:  This Saturday, April 4, from 6-9 PM at the Creative Research Laboratory. The show will be up from April 4-25, 2009.

Steven Garber, how to keep on keeping on

 “If faith does shape vocation which does shape culture, then it is crucial to take the time to ask and answer the perennial questions that everyone asks and everyone answers, such as what do I believe about faith, vocation and culture? Those three words take us into realms that are difficult to fully fathom—and yet to understand them is central to human flourishing.” Steven Garber

Comment Magazine, edited by Gideon Strauss, seeks to apply a biblical worldview to the intersections of business, government, arts, culture, education, and work.  Each week they publish a brief interview with someone at work in any number of these fields.

The current interview with Steven Garber is well worth a read. Garber is the Director of The Washington Institute and the author of The Fabric of Faithfulness, which he summarizes as follows:

"The heart of its analysis and argument is that there are habits of heart that sustain people over time, so that the question of "forming moral meaning" is not rocket-science. People who keep on keeping on are men and women who (1) develop a worldview that can make sense of life, giving us the possibility of living with "the grain of the universe," the truth about God, the human condition, and history—against the challenge of a pluralizing, secularizing world; (2) find a mentor, a teacher, who embodies the worldview we are beginning to call our own, with grace and hospitality allowing the truest learning to take place, the over-the-shoulder, through-the-heart kind; and (3) commit to a community of like-minded, like-hearted people who together, over the course of years, are an incarnation of that worldview—even as we stumble along, clay-footed as we necessarily will be. The question for all of us is finally: can we sustain our beliefs—or will time and circumstance wear them out, causing us to become worn out?"

We have a couple copies on the book table.  See what you think.

The end of art & the school of life

First Things has an article by Roger Kimball entitled The End of Art. If you’re interested in art and its interaction with religion, you might enjoy Kimball’s essay.  Here’s a taste:

"By the nineteenth century, art had long been free from serving the ideological needs of religion, and yet the spiritual crisis of the age tended to invest art with ever-greater existential burdens—burdens that continue to be felt to this day. In Wallace Stevens’ words, 'After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.'”

I wonder if this “existential burden” is being felt at London’s new church alternative, The School of Life?  This curious “shop” seeks to promote “intelligent instruction on how to live a fulfilled life.” Meals, sermons, books, and a blog…it sounds a little like All Saints. Here’s how they describe their sermons:

Amuse-Bouche

Amuse-Bouche
/ä-müz-büsh/, noun
Etymology: French, literally, (it) entertains (the) mouth
A small morsel of food to excite the taste buds; often serves as a hint to the chef's cooking style and the meal to come.

The Creative Research Laboratory (CRL) introduces Amuse-Bouche, a selection of tasty treats from eight University of Texas at Austin MFA students curated by eight Art History graduate students.  This show marks the seventh consecutive year of collaboration between Department of Art and Art History graduate students on a summer exhibition at the CRL.  This select group of work represents a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, large-scale works on paper, and video.   

Featured artists include All Saints members Josh Welker and Sonya Berg. 

The CRL is located in East Austin at 2832 East Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard (inside Flatbed World Headquarters) & is free to the public.

Mary Grace the Neurotic

“The book struck her directly over her left eye.”

If I had a Top 5 Fiction Sentences list, which I probably should, this would be on it.  Recently I re-read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation,” a story about people in a doctor’s waiting room (based on O’Connor’s frequent doctor visits during her struggle with lupus).*  Ruby Turpin, the story’s narrator and protagonist, sits in the room with her husband Claud, who is suffering from a leg injury.  They are surrounded by what Mrs. Turpin calls white trash, prompting her to reflect on her own status.  She frequently muses out loud how fortunate she is to be a godly woman with “a little of everything and the God-given sense to use it right.”

Through a glass, darkly?

All Saints lacks a building, let alone stained glass windows. Quite the opposite is true in Europe where two new stained glass works have been crafted by two of the world’s foremost contemporary artists, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke.

Richter’s work now fills the south transept of the Cologne Cathedral which was bombed out in WWII. Upon their completion, Polke’s twelve windows will be placed in Zurich’s Romanesque Grossmünster.

This recent New Yorker article tells the fascinating story of how the windows came about, who the artists are, what they hoped to achieve, and the beautiful and perplexing results of their efforts.

Arts Wannabe

Last week's Transforming Culture Arts conference hosted by the Hill Country Institute for Contemporary Christianity was a bittersweet experience for me.  Sweet in that I got the chance be instructed by some extraordinarily wise brothers and sisters--Eugene Peterson, Lucy Shaw, Barbara Nicolosi, David Taylor just to name a few-- and to hang out with artsy people.  (Growing up in Alabama I was told that there are two types of people: athletes and athletic supporters. Barbara amended this to artists and arts supporters.) Bitter in that while I'm an arts wannabe, I often feel that I barely qualify as an arts jock.