Two years ago I had the great pleasure of joining a memorable conversation on the church and the arts in Austin, Texas, convened by the inimitable W. David O. Taylor and the Hill Country Institute. Now several talks from that event (including one of my own), along with some really stellar new material, have been collected in the new book For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts. Over the next week I'll post some excerpts. If you care about Christianity and the arts, you won't want to miss this helpful, hopeful new book. Today: David's explanation of why, and for whom, the book was written.

re: art, churches, cultivation and creation, david taylor

Andy:

As a working pastor I found my tradition ambivalent, if not actively resistant, to the artistic life—to the imagination, the emotions, the senses, the material realm, and beauty. . . . If I were a gardener, I would say that my tradition offered me thin soil with little hope for a flourishing of the arts. At worst, it taught me to view the arts as ultimately expendable, a luxury far from the center of biblical Christianity. . . .

This book aims to redress this deficiency. It aims to inspire the church, in its life and mission, with an expansive vision for the arts. By “the arts” I mean at least music, dance, drama, poetry and other literary arts, visual arts, film, and architecture. This book seeks to show how the many parts of the landscape of church and art can hold together. . . .

For whom is this book written? It is written for pastors and artists along with lay leaders working in the context of the church. This book is for pastors who gather in cathedrals or in junior high cafeterias, for artists in the urban core or, as the case may be, out in the cornfields. It aims to inform our ecclesiology as Protestant Christians, regardless of our material or missional particulars.

My hope is that this book will also be of benefit to educators and seminary students, to critical observers of Christianity and the arts, and to all those who seek a common vocabulary to advance the discussion of the church’s mission of artmaking.