The Tate has a gorgeous exhibition at the moment, peacocking two of the greats, Turner and Constable. They were contemporaries, rivals, and compared, even in their lifetimes. But was John Constable a Christian?
Category: aesthetics
Ask any artist if they have seen computer generated art which is designed to sell – to outsell the human. The question they’re wrestling with, is this: What is the point of being a human artist? Christians and their non-Christian colleagues are asking exactly the same question.
A book that has sold in the millions only repays the price of buying it if you start to journal. But is it a Spiritual pathway?
‘Do you understand what you’re reading?’, asked Philip of the Ethiopian. We can ask that, and other similar questions. Do you understand what you’re listening to? Do you understand what you’re looking at?
All over the world, flagship Apple Stores are offering a free, immersive Augmented Reality experience; a walking Tour around six artworks, ‘anchored’ in the area.
Hutchmoot has just happened, in the UK for the first time. What, you ask, is a Hutchmoot? Well, let me tell you a story. In Nashville, Tennessee, lives the wonderfully talented Andrew Peterson. He’s a novelist, and a publisher, and a family man, and he keeps bees, but he is also, and above all, a
Our local on-trend coffee shop has good publicity, chairs and paintwork. They have the proper kit as well. They like creation too.
Why shouldn’t we be in dread of the Last Trumpet? Won’t we leap to our feet, heart in mouth, when we hear it? Shouldn’t we tremble in death’s presence, and thrill at its defeat? Shouldn’t we preachers use all our skill too, to help people see God’s awesome glory?
It is becoming harder for TV programmes to shock enough to get ratings, and that’s only partly because they up against an unrated internet. It’s also because as a culture (and Evangelical sub-culture) we have become much, much harder to shock.
If I said that this was the most important piece of secular philosophy I have read in a long time, you’d probably switch off. But it is, and I want you to read it.
These painters are explicitly aiming to paint an eternal tragedy. They are painting what we would call the Fallen Condition. They are expressing what it means to be a ruined Image Bearer.
At the back of our church was a small, rather drab, bookcase. It was used to store songbooks, and Bibles. But we had bought a larger new one, and we were going to redecorate, so we wondered about chucking it out. The brakes went on. Because fixed to the top of the bookcase was a
When Jesus underlined the first and greatest commandment he added to it. ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength’ (Mk.12:30). What was implicit throughout the Old Testament, that truth and words and wisdom are aspects of God’s character and therefore of
So, I’ve suggested thee angles to answering the question of what is beautiful. Angle 1: something is beautiful because it is truthful. The words or ideas it uses resonate with reality, and we recognise and enjoy that. Angle 2: something is beautiful because it affects or moves us, perhaps with delight, often with sadness, and
Some things just work, and because they work well they give pleasure. If you doubt that, think about what happens when something doesn’t work, and how you experience the opposite of pleasure. A fork is an elegantly simple solution to a problem, and it has hardly changed since its introduction. The robotic explorer on Mars
I can order a coffee fluently in a number of European languages, but beyond that the curse of Babel hits hard. I have a little schoolboy French, some tourist’s Italian and German but beyond that I’m stumped. Words matter. I had a tortuous few days in Belgium in an area where to get the language
The Culture section of my Sunday paper covers the same things every week: plays and music, opera and ballet, books, movies and the rest. And only very rarely is anything remotely Christian covered. Which a moment’s reflection would show, is very odd. Because, before the last half century, any artistic contribution only made sense with
