Here is a list of articles that Incarnation Ministries® thinks you will find interesting.
- Art and Kuyper – Comment Review July 2011
- Arts and Christianity Manifestos – Geoff Hall
- Barbarian Press – Why the Book – Jan Elsted
- Beauty – Plato v Aristotle – Jonah Cacioppe 2001
- Calvinism and the Arts – Kuyper
- Eugene Peterson – Image Interview
- God for Artists and Artist for God – Kyle Bennett -Cardus Blogs February 2012
- Following Beauty into the Desert – Lent Sermon –Levandoski
- Why Beauty – David Jennings
- What Bill Gates Is Blind To: Argument for Art Patronage –WSJ
- Fantastic Imagination – George MacDonald
- Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture – George MacDonald
“Beauty awakens the soul to act.”
Dante
“Prayer and art are passionate acts of will. One wants to transcend and enhance the will’s normal possibilities. Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts. Prayer means casting oneself into the miraculous rainbow that stretches between becoming and dying, to be utterly consumed in it, in order to bring its infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of one’s own existence.”
Franz Kafka
“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
Andrei Tarkovsky
“A great audience, Fran Lebowitz once remarked, is more important for the creation of great art than even great artists are. She was thinking, in fact, of the postwar audience, specifically in New York, the one that nurtured Balanchine, Rauschenberg, Miles Davis, and so many others. Great audiences create great artists, she explained, by giving people the freedom to take chances: to be irresponsible, dangerous, difficult, strange. When people compete to be sophisticated, artists win. Then we all win.”
William Deresiewicz
“There’s something bovine about cinema, which is also what is spectacular about both popular art and art in public: the confirmation that the individual spirit is also the shared spirit, that what is vulnerable and personal and redeemable about us, is in all of us. Art makes us feel realer and deeper, and to share that with others makes us feel less alone. But for the same reason, bad art can also seem like an insult to the human race itself: that’s all we are?”
Esther Manov
“God’s beauty is the light and the object of delight, the shared gaze of love that belongs to the persons of the Trinity; it is what God beholds, what the Father sees and rejoices in the Son, in the sweetness of the Spirit, what Son and Spirit find delightful in one another, because as Son and Spirit of the Father they share his knowledge and love as person. This cannot be emphasized enough: the Christian God, who is infinite, is also infinitely formosus, the supereminent fullness of all form, transcendently determinate, always possessed of his Logos. True beauty is not the idea of the beautiful, a static archetype in the “mind” of God, but is an infinite “music,” drama, art, completed in-but never “bounded” by-the termless dynamism of the Trinity’s life; God is boundless, and so is never a boundary; his music possesses the richness of every transition, interval, measure, variation-all dancing and delight. And because he is beautiful, being abounds with difference: shape, variety, manifold relation. Beauty is the distinction of the different, the otherness of the other, the true form of distance.”
David Bentley Hart
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