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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
JEFF BERRYMAN 