My Top Art & Faith Books for 2016
Christians are a people of the Word. We are
also a people marked by words. Sometimes we are a people who fail to use words
carefully enough. We beat them to death, we rob them of their mystery, we jumble them and clog our ears with them and abuse one another and rob
ourselves of dignity with them. McEntyre takes
fifteen words—like listen, enjoy, resist,
ask, leave, welcome—and she gives each word a week, guiding readers in an
examination of the word from seven different angles throughout the week. With
the word “ask,” for example, she reflects on the meaning of statements like,
“Ask for what you need” or “Ask for what you cannot predict” or “Ask without an
agenda.” With the word “dare,” as with all other words in the book, she draws
on the spiritual practices of lectio divina and centering
prayer as a way to make sense of things like “Dare to admit honest failure” or
“ Dare to protest abuse of power.” "I invite you to discover," says
McEntyre in her introduction, "how words may become little fountains of
grace. How a single word may, if you hold it for a while, become a
prayer." Those are good things to discover.
2.
Patricia
S. Klein, Worship Without Words: The Signs and Symbols of Our Faith (Paraclete Press: 2007).
What is an Advent rose? What is All
Souls Day? What purpose does an amice serve? What is the symbolic meaning of a
basilica or of the liturgical color blue? What’s the relationship between a
cauldron of oil and St. John the Apostle? What’s the churching of women all
about? How do the images of a dolphin, donkey and dove help us to perceive the
gospel? What do we make of an Exaudi and an excommunication? And how do a
fleur-de-lis, a Gradual, a handcuff, an incense boat, a Jesse tree, a knotted
club, the lifting of hands, the mantelletta, the nimbus, the Octave of
Christmas, the pelican, the Quadragesima, the rochet, the Feast of St. Michael
and all Angels, the thurifer, the Venite,
and wimple, the yeast and the zucchetto
enable the church to worship God? If you wish to know the answer to these
questions, then you’ll want to get your hands on this magnificent resource.
It’s the best of its kind.
3.
Steve
Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Harvard University Press:
2006).
Why do human beings sing? How long
have human beings been singing? What exactly is singing? What does singing “do”?
To say that singing brings people together, or as Alice Parker once put it, “singing
is one of the most companionable arts,” is to give a generic and unsatisfactory
answer. It is to state the obvious, even if it is true. Mithen’s book answers
these questions by expositions on the relationship between music and language,
music and the brain, music and emotion, music and sociality, music and sex and
love as well as music and parenthood. While Mithen seeks, in some measure, to
explain the “mystery” of music, he does not presume to diminish the mystery
that makes music so central to human life.
So much of the success or failure of a
fruitful conversation in the field of faith and the arts hinges on a clear use
of terms. While terms like beauty,
transcendence or sacramental are
quite popular in writing about art and faith, rarely are such terms carefully
defined. Without any kind of definition, assumptions are made by the
author/speaker of a reader/audience and the result is often cacophony. With
poor communication comes unfortunately the loss of communion. It’s for that
reason that little books like Roholt’s are so welcome (little in page numbers,
substantial in content). He defines terms like aesthetic judgment, formalism,
Marxism and Sublime. He explains who Adorno and Danto are and why they matter
to the discipline of philosophical aesthetics. He introduces the reader to key
texts, such as Aristotle’s Poetics and
John Dewey’s Art as Experience. And
he offers a brief tour of art forms like dance and photography and tragedy. All
I’ll add here is this: if only books like this were better known and if only more
books like this were on offer.
The title alone is worth the price
of admission. In this collection of essays we are reminded, yet again, that
every practice of corporate worship is culturally shaped and therefore relative
to that cultural context. With Tertullian’s comment in mind (“whatever belongs
to those that are of us, belongs to us”), liturgical theologian Gordon Lathrop
writes, “So today, in the renewed liturgy, we keep a revised version of the
ancient Asian Christian reworking of the Jewish Passover to become our Pascha,
or Easter, the ancient Roman (and then northern European) Christian reworking
of the pagan winter solstice has now become our Christmas, as well as the
eastern Mediterranean (and perhaps ancient Spanish) creation of Epiphany and
the ancient Egyptian and African creation of Lent.” With plenty of insights
much like this one, the book is a friendly reminder that our liturgical
practices don’t come from nowhere. They come from particular times and places, and as Newbigin might remind us, we do
well not to confuse the gospel with our cultural homes.
6.
Howard
Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of
Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 2011). Michael Polanyi, Meaning (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1975). Mark Johnson, The
Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2007).
If you wish to understand how the
arts involve a way of being in the world, capacities to know the world in
unique and irreducible ways, intelligences of their own, without which we could
not be human, and a way for humans to generate and discover meaning in the
world—in God’s world no less—then you
could hardly go wrong by reading these three books. They should be required
reading for every student of theology and the arts in particular and for faith
and the arts in general.
I’ve read bits and pieces of
Copeland’s life in magazine articles and newspaper interviews over the past
several years. I became curious about her life, so I decided to read her
biography, which proved to be inspiring and, well, moving. She is in every way
an unlikely ballerina. Life in Motion offers,
as one might expect, a glimpse into the competitive world of ballet and, as one
might not expect, insight into the racial tensions and class conflicts that mar
a less-than delicate discipline of art.
De
todo hay en la viña del Señor. There’s a little bit of everything in the
vineyard of the Lord, as my dad would often say to me when we lived in
Guatemala. This is just as true of Christian practices as of musical practices.
In this “short introduction,” Rice explores the discipline of ethnomusicology,
as the study of music in all its biological, social, historical, cultural and
artistic diversity. It’s an excellent introduction and a salutary reminder that
westerners do not have the market on “good” or “useful” music.
Originally published in 1872 and often
regarded by critics as the least interesting of Hardy’s novels, Under the Greenwood Tree revolves around
an amusing conflict between a group of rough-hewn church musicians, the
Mellstock parish choir, and a vicar who wishes to replace the choir with an
organ, to be played by the comely new mistress, Fancy Day. It’s a perfect
reminder that, as far as art in worship goes, there is nothing new under the
sun. It’s also a perfectly delightful “pastoral” novel.
10.
Masao
Takenaka, The Place Where God Dwells: An
Introduction to Church Architecture in Asia (Hong Kong: Christian
Conference of Asia/Auckland: Pace Publishing, 1995).
One of the things that the church
has wrestled with historically is the question of contextualization. What does
it mean to contextualize the gospel in a different time and place? Takenaka’s
book includes a helpful introductory chapter, identifying the lines of thought
that give birth to a distinctively Asian architectural sensibility, followed by
a magnificent collection of examples of church architecture across the Asian
continent. It’s a refreshing reminder that all church architecture, whether
Western or Eastern, whether urban or rural, is an instance of non-neutral
contextualization.
11.
Brewster
Ghiselin, editor, The Creative Process: Reflections on Invention in the Arts and Sciences (University of California
Press: 1952).
What is creativity? And how is
creativity at work in the life of writers, artists and scientists? This
wonderful selection of entries includes letters by Einstein and Mozart,
reflections on the process of inspiration by Jean Cocteau, Stephen Spender’s
thoughts on the making of a poem, and the origins of a work of art by Rudyard
Kipling, Dorothy Canfield, Friedrich Nietzsche and Katherine Anne Porter. It’s
a miscellany of material but insightful all the way through.
If there is one thing I love more
than most, it is reading about how artists think about their life and work.
This book, which constitutes the fourth volume of collected interviews
published by The Paris Review,
includes conversations with, among others, Maya Angelou, Stephen Sondheim,
Marilynne Robinson and, one of my favorites, Haruki Murakami. With an
introduction by Salman Rushdie, the book is a perfect companion to a rainy day
along with a nice cup of tea.
What if the moon blew up and the debris that
resulted from this catastrophe rained down through the atmosphere in a way that
guaranteed the scorching of the entire earth? What if all living species were
to be wiped out as a result? What if humans had enough time to choose a (controversially)
representative group to escape earth and to live in a “Cloud Ark” until the
“hard rain” subsided? What if it took 5,000 years for the lunar fire and
brimstone to subside? What if the population on the Cloud Ark qua Space Station
were reduced to seven females? What if these women figured out a way to
reproduce themselves and, 5,000 years later, to generate seven new races and to
survive in space until earth was re-habitable? And what if two groups of human beings had in fact been able to survive on planet earth, by digging deep into
the earth and by submersing deep into the ocean, and each group had experience
a minor form of biological evolution? It’s these questions that make
Stephenson’s book riveting stuff, thick with hard science, light and dismissive
of religion, but with characters and dialogue that make the novel philosophically
compelling business. It’s one of the many sci-fi books I read this year and
certainly one of my favorites.
If Andy Crouch is right in saying that the
best way to change a culture is by making new culture, and if the best cultural
changes come about by way of relationship, then Fujimura’s book, as a cultural
artifact, is a model of “culture care” (as he has termed his present mission).
Fujimura, in conversation with Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, touches on a perennial religious question: pain and
suffering and the deafening, sometimes oppressive silence of God. Whether the
experience of God’s silence turns into something beautiful is always a
possibility for the pilgrim. But the possibility of beauty is never a demand
that we can make of God, it is only a gift that we can receive, often on the
inscrutable timetable of God’s mysterious purposes—which of course sounds great
on paper but in actual fact, as I know firsthand, is profoundly wounding and,
as witnessed in Endo’s protagonists, soul-crushing. Thank God for literary
companions along the way, like Endo and Fujimura.
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