"Artists as Stewards of Physical Reality": 2014 Laity Lodge retreat

May 31, 2013

"Artists as Stewards of Physical Reality": 2014 Laity Lodge retreat

"Ascending Arc" -- Erica Grimm Vance (2001), encaustic on Baltic birch

What good is your body?

Why do you have a body?

What do you know through your body that you could not know otherwise?

What do you know of God through your senses?

What does it mean "to be at home in your own skin"?

What does it mean to be an earthling, kinaesthetically oriented to the kingdom, church and world?

How does the physical form of our homes and our churches shape us?

How does the material form of our public and our private spaces shape what we desire and imagine possible?

What is the theological significance that bodiliness has been taken up into the Godhead through Christ?

How do we think theologically about the fact that, during this earthly pilgrimage, our bodies incur diminishment and decay but our souls do not?

Are you at home in your body?

How do artists help us to live lively before God and well in the world?

What does the Holy Spirit have to do with our creaturely reality?

And what does it mean for artists to act as stewards of physical reality through the artworks which they make?

And does this stewardship exhibit itself equally in architects as in novelists, in filmmakers as in electronic musicians?

These are the sorts of questions we will be exploring in our sixth Laity Lodge retreat for ministers to artists, March 6-9, 2014. To see what we've done in previous years, please go here (2009), here (2010), here (2011), here (2012) and here & here (2013).

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Trevor Hart, Professor of Divinity and Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the University of St Andrews, will be our featured speaker for this retreat. He will give two talks related to the questions above; I in turn will present a third. Trevor's most recent works include Between the Image and the Word: Theological Engagements with Imagination, Literature and Language (Ashgate, 2013) and Making Good: Creation, Creativity and Artistry (Baylor University Press, 2014). Trevor is an ordained priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, and for the past twenty five years has enjoyed the opportunity for ministry in a local congregation alongside his full-time role as a university teacher. More on Trevor soon!

This retreat will function as Part 2 of a three-part series, which investigates three constituent features of an artist's calling. This past March James K. A. Smith explored with us the idea of "artists as caretakers of the imagination." In 2015 we will examine the relationship between art and the emotions.

It goes without saying that I feel very lucky to partner with Laity Lodge on these retreats. I also feel lucky to learn alongside a group of folks that come from all professions and engagements with artists, from full-time pastors to directors of arts centers to art educators to "regular" lay persons--a humble but infinitely interesting bunch of people, all of whom share a common love of artists and a desire to disciple them well.

To register for the retreat, please go here. Our retreat will post soon. Check back at this blog for more information.

Oh, and one more thing: our featured artist will be professional modern dancer (or dancers). It's going to be great fun, I have no doubt. I can't wait.