I was culling back through my emails and noticed one that I must have missed somewhere along the way. It was from a pastor named Joel Pelsue down in Los Angeles where he runs a ministry called Arts and Entertainment Ministries. I haven’t had a chance to look over the web site much yet, but [...]
Entries from January 2008
January 22, 2008
Beauty and Race
I talked with some beautiful people last week. The Northwest Church has a history of doing special events on MLK Sunday, having long been interested in racial reconciliation. This year, I invited five panelists (two black men, two black women, and one white woman) to participate in a half-hour conversation about the current status of [...]
January 19, 2008
Beauty is Tension
Sometime back in the 1990′s, a book was published by the Theatre Communications Guild (I think) that dealt in performance anthropology. The book chronicled performance traditions from cultures around the world, and one of the ideas the studies explored was the push/pull of balance and tension. In the body of the actor, the structure needed [...]
January 18, 2008
Beauty is Order
This sounds static, suggesting at first glance symmetry, a stolid arrangement of properties that 50′s housewives might call beautiful, but to the eyes and hearts of the postmodern…boring. For the wilder romantic, order means predictability means oppression (in the realm of experience). To be alive means to meet the chaotic mix of experience full-on, without [...]
January 16, 2008
Beauty is Relationship
When it comes to perception, we start with the senses. We are a visual culture, and in casual usage, the word “beauty” is most often associated with what we see. Beauty that strikes us visually usually involves a pleasing or satisfying “form,” some relationship between various aesthetic properties that we often perceive in an instant. [...]
January 15, 2008
Beauty
What is “beauty’s” primary referent? What exists that gives us the notion of beauty? Where does the very idea begin? How important is beauty? What is its nature and meaning? How do we account for its pervasive presence in experience? How does life change with the waxing and waning of beauty? Is beauty a thing [...]
January 14, 2008
The Ideal and the Real
Got home Saturday night and rose early Sunday morning to finalize preparation for the morning sermon. The story of Simeon reminded me of the constant tension between the idealism of salvation’s arrival and the realism of the suffering Jesus’ coming would mean. I preached that Simeon was a man of truth, saying what was what [...]
January 11, 2008
Jacob’s Dream
8:oo o’clock here and my hands are having a hard time typing. I was just outside in 38 degree weather for the past hour hanging around for the sunrise. I wanted to see Jack Maxwell’s major sculptural piece, “Jacob’s Ladder” in the first light of morning. The sunrise was perfect, but my hands were so [...]
January 10, 2008
Day Four
Incarnation. To enflesh. That was the topic that carried us through the morning, looking at Jesus as “form” to God’s “content”, seeing in the action of the incarnation the essential move the artist must make. Abstraction is a beginning, but like faith, it is dead without work. The move to the concrete is everything. An [...]
January 9, 2008
Day Three
Yesterday was another envigorating day of discussion. We talked about the implications of God’s creation for artists and audiences–what we would understand of God simply by observing His creation and how that understanding might guide and inform our own work, both in terms of form and content, process and product. Then we kicked around the [...]
