It is an interesting moment of value when a graffiti tagged wall is worth more than the bricks themselves, perhaps even all the bricks of the entire structure that has been adorned with its tagging. Detroit is dealing with this strange irony and all the randomly ridiculous quarrels around the un-rules of street art, thanks to the international spray paint sensation known as Banksy.

I was recently treated to the fascinating film documentary surrounding the subversive world of the graffiti artists; Exit Through the Gift Shop.

In so many ways, the title says it all… once you can buy it in the “gift shop” (even a really high priced one)… have you exited the opportunity for authentic artistic expression, have you sold out? Well, of course the answer is no… right? But there does seem to be an obvious inverse relationship between the consciousness of the marketing campaign and the authenticity of the art. The better you are at selling it… the cheaper it seems to get…

I do like the Banksy character as I met him in this film, which was not really about him in the end… more produced by him out of a sense of responsibility. I think there are going to be some great quotes from this film about art… all I can do now is paraphrase.

I used to encourage everyone to create and just make art… (long pause as he considers the travesty of art gone awry that is Mr. Brainwash)…

I don’t do that anymore…

~Banksy

Categories: Authenticity, Creativity, Art, Movies
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What then is the good of occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing the inner eye earnestly on things that can never exist–on Dante’s earthly paradise, Thetis rising from the sea to comfort Achilles, Chaucer’s or Spenser’s lady Nature, or the Mariner’s skeleton ship?

The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being.

We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. And even when we build disinterested fantasies, they are saturated with, and limited by, our own psychology.

We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.

We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors. One of the things we feel after reading a great work is ‘I have got out’. Or from another point of view, ‘I have got in’…

Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three.

In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are.

The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandize himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this.

Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But this is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it’.

~C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

• 
  An Experiment in Criticism (Canto)
  Author: C. S. Lewis

39Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

~Matthew 10:39

24For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.

~Luke 9:24

I love this man. He continues to astound me with practical insights that are all at once insightful, transcendent, and prophetically important to my present struggles. Somewhere in the past decade I had built up a strong suspicion of this sentiment being true in my approach to art, film, and literature… always difficult to live out though.

It is a tricky business, much literature written now a days along the lines of “self help” or “how to” really does not qualify as “literature to be appreciated” and comes packed with so much staunch philosophical bending that it is impossible to read it without your guard up. Once burned, twice shy.

Christian “how to manuals” for life are notorious for this, and in an odd sort of way the bad taste they leave in your mouth begins to make everything else you eat taste very bland.

I believe this same thing happens in life lived, we do empathize, and then we find out the lie. Being played the fool or giving into someone’s disillusion is hard to recover from, and over time these moments of subtle betrayal build up callouses on your heart and its ability to empathize.

A good book, film, story, or song does wonders to wash away all of the defenses and allow us to enjoy that very good moment of empathetic enlargement of the soul as we “See with other eyes…”

And the eventual hope would be that this enlargement of our being would be something that we could truly carry with us beyond the inner world of a personal encounter with a work of art and out into the world where we interact with everyone and everything.

This is where the cut comes back I believe on “art for arts sake”… regardless, there is no way to enter into it but through vulnerability… easier said than done.

Categories: Empathy, Reading, C.S. Lewis, Art, Books
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When fighting and death exercise their wild dominion around us, then we are called to bear witness to God’s love and God’s peace not only by word and thought, but also by our deeds. Read James 4:1-12! We should daily ask ourselves where we can bear witness in what we do to the kingdom in which love and peace prevail. The great peace for which we long can only grow again from peace between twos and threes. Let us put an end to all hate, mistrust, envy, disquiet, wherever we can. “Blessed are the pacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom

• 
  A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

James 4

Submit Yourselves to God

1What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. 3When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

4You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely?[a] 6But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
“God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble.”[b]

7Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

11Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. 12There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you—who are you to judge your neighbor?

~James 4:1-12

• What causes fights and quarrels among you?
• Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?
• You want something but don’t get it.

It’s hard to own up to, but its true… most of the strife and contention in my life is of my own doing. On some internal plane of hyperactive-reasoning and contemplation, I create all the worries and concerns of the imaginary tomorrow. All this anxiety has to come out somewhere, unfortunately this “somewhere” is oftentimes within the relationships that should be characterized by love and peace.

Family in-fighting, friendship strife, community squabbles, city divisions, political venom, world wide paranoia…

…what could be the antidote to such evils?


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Categories: C.S. Lewis, Judgement, Peace, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Advice, Books, Art, Criticisms
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I probably have no moment of greater indulgent film pleasure than that of watching mechanized forces of good and evil tear each other apart via ballistic fisticuffs of glory.

For this reason, a movie like Iron Man is my saccharine technolust desire and completion, I cannot refuse its allure any more than I can resist a handful of peanut M&Ms.

But try to pawn off a bag of regular M&Ms on me, and I will most likely turn up my nose with scoffing resignation… much like my derisive laughter at the horrible beer commercial excuse of a movie Transformers…

I want and need something beyond the candy shell…

One could hardly call computer generated robo-scrimmages “high art”, but if we attempt to get beyond that shellacked candy surface and dig in for the chocolate and the nut, do we find anything that satisfies?

Being a self proclaimed film aficionado and having expressed deep admiration for the first Iron Man film, many people have been asking me for my opinion on the latest sequel.

And as I begin my reply by restating the grand triumph of the first film as perhaps my favorite “super hero” film of all time… most folks get where I am going with what is at best going to be a second hand compliment to an attempt at a worthy sequel.

• 
  Iron Man (Ultimate Two-Disc Edition + BD Live) [Blu-ray]
  Director: Paramount

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Categories: C.S. Lewis, Film, Reviews, Art, Movies, Books, Criticisms
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… the tendency of conservatism to produce individuals who swing violently from one extreme to another.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” runs the familiar maxim, and this pitfall is its religious equivalent…

…Yesterday’s conservative fundamentalist suddenly becomes the Pied Piper for today’s Emergent doubters, yesterday’s Bible College student the leading skeptic about the Bible’s authority, yesterday’s student Christan group leader today’s radical theological revisionist, yesterday’s advocate of “theistic proofs” today’s enthusiast for encounter groups, yesterday’s son of a Christan leader, today’s sharpest tongued attacker of his father’s faith–and so on. Modern conservatives are oscillation-prone–and having swung from one side to the other, the rest of his or her life is spent in a series of compulsive attempts to purge a new-found liberal soul of its immature conservative past.

~Os Guinness, The Last Christian on Earth

• 
  The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy’s Plot to Undermine the Church
  Author: Os Guinness

It’s hard to swallow at first. Conservative, doesn’t that mean strong and sturdy and forever unchanging? Are not conservatives the defacto bulwarks of society? Well, conservationists may be, but conservatives by history and personal experience do seem to live out this vicious cycle.


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Categories: Conservatism, Christianity, Art, Books
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Every man who tries to obey the Master is my brother, whether he counts me such or not, and I revere him; but dare I give quarter to what I see to be a lie because my brother believes it? The lie is not of God, whoever may hold it.

~George MacDonald

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

If what we believe matters at all, extreme passivism is not ultimately compatible. We will contend for what we believe is true, even if we are to say that one should not contend. The tricky part of this statement is the inherent subjectivity of any judgment; the “…what I see to be a lie…” source of one’s contention for the truth. Folks who are well acquainted with history tend to have a better grasp on what has proven to be a myth or a truth. In some way, all rigorous theologians are truly historians of Christian thought.

I believe the danger for modern folks like myself is the jumping into fervent argument with a cursory understanding of the material to begin with. Information floats about me with the temptation of mastery simply because I am aware of an idea. I know a little bit about everything and I believe I must side up on every apparent issue and defend “the truth”, however that is presented to me.

C.S. Lewis was a prolific critic, but he tempered his criticism with what he called “genial criticism”; something he apparently picked up from a chap named Coleridge.

Basically, the idea is that we should criticize, but we should stick to criticizing within a genre that we also appreciate. If you actually like science fiction movies, then go ahead and blast away at Avatar… if you think all of sci-fi is worthless adolescent gunslinger fantasy fluff… then you should probably hold back on your moral critiques of the genre.

In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.

~C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

• 
  An Experiment in Criticism (Canto)
  Author: C. S. Lewis

This rebuke towards genial criticism is one that good friends have brought to my doorstep on numerous occasions in regards to all sorts of stilted aspersions on my behalf.

It is hard to back down on an argument, but when you have to deal with the question of why you care to criticize in the first place it does become easier.

I like movies, and I am a critic.
I like stories, and I am a critic.
I like technology, and I am a critic.
I like theology, and I am a critic.
I don’t really care much for sports, politics, and faith healing…

…so it should be easy for me to hold my tongue there.

Categories: Orthodoxy, C.S. Lewis, Art, Books, Criticisms
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You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.

The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

~Your affectionate uncle, SCREWTAPE

• 
  The Screwtape Letters
  Author: C. S. Lewis

I suppose this may be the essential warning to which I now bristle at the engagement of time with social networking and video games. My generation seems to be particularly susceptible to this drifting gaze into the flickering pixels of a digital fire.

It’s not so much the value judgment of the activity itself as it is the tendency for it to take root in our posture and slowly become our expectation for enjoyment, a passive dissipation into nothingness… a silent withdrawal into the placid gaze of The Brave New World.

A friend of mine recently passed on this video from OK GO. I think this is an endearing example of how to escape this temptation towards postmodern nihilistic narcissism.

Making a big silly Rude Goldberg Machine could be deemed a completely worthless activity by anyone looking to quantify the value quotient of the effort. But, watching this… thinking about all the fun effort that went into getting it to work, and then absorbing the emotional connection to the message of “This Too Shall Pass” is a beautiful moment.

This is why I love the arts, how can anyone justify this endeavor going in and how can anyone not concede its necessity after seeing it accomplished? A wonderful paradox of life engagement…

Categories: Apathy, Ambition, C.S. Lewis, Fun, Music, Art, Books
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Last year I ventured into a theology class at a local seminary. My father was taking a few classes in his retirement and I decided to join him for one on a promotional scholarship, Trinitarianism 402.

I must admit, I entered the class with a casual sophomoric confidence… the abstract paradox of the trinity is something I had been swallowing as a basic “truth” about God since I was probably 7 years old. The class structure was fast paced academia from the get go, there was lots of material, terminology, and history to get through in our once a week 4 hour lecture sessions… and our professor was not going to waste any time with a drawn out setup.

To be fair, this is a 400 level class, and most folks attending a seminary long enough to get to this class have had plenty of time to ponder a more holistic reality of God… so diving into the specifics of the content is pretty reasonable.

However, my father (a self proclaimed evangelist and exhorter) begged to differ. After reading what seemed like a random collection of esoteric theology discussion books and enduring several weeks of long lectures laden with ancient insider terminology… he was out. I didn’t blame him, but I was down for finishing off the class and I think I was even learning something. Strange new words like “Perichoresis” offered entrance into a very old conversation about God and His triune nature.

The ancient theologian John of Damascus (c.675-c.749), may have been the first to coin the term “Perichoresis” as an reference to the mutual indwelling of persons described in this passage.

John 17:20-26

20″My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 23I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24″Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. 25″Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. 26I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

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Categories: Eugene Peterson, C.S. Lewis, Scripture, Art, Bible Study, Mars Hill Audio, Theology
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One of the strangest aspects of religious faith is how old ideas, truths, and lessons are continually reborn with new significance as life is experienced and reconsidered, the arts have a wonderful way of forcing us to pause and take time for this moment.

I am sure I had the ten commandments described to me succinctly when I was 5 years old or so in Sunday School. At that time I most likely was focused on the 5th commandment (4th if you are Catholic) “Honor your mother and father”. The presentation was probably accompanied by some exposition to the pointed application of not talking back to my parents and otherwise being a compliant child in order to fall in line with this positive directive from the overall collection.

Over the years I may have come across a good number of references to the ten commandments in order to enforce a particular point of morality, behavior, or theological inquiry. But more often than not, the ten commandments was not something that I regularly thought about or considered to be even a worthwhile structure for working through my faith… after all, didn’t Jesus get us beyond all those stodgy and definitive statements of the old Jewish religion?

In light of that general posture, I am willing to bet it would have been very difficult for me to even enumerate the ten commandments in the most simplistic list just a few weeks ago. Having recently attempted to do so with a small group of friends, we found ourselves at a questioning loss as to what the definitive collection of the ten commandments actually are. Different religious traditions create slightly different subsets based on the following breakdown, taken from Wikipedia… please forgive my violation of perhaps the 8th and 9th commandments.

This rediscovery of the ten commandments comes through the good fortune of my neighbor speaking very highly of a certain polish film maker who created what many consider to be the only television masterpiece of film work, The Dekalog.

Krzysztof Kieślowski is quickly becoming a distant mentor and example of handling great mysteries with exceptional honesty, respectful care, subjective content and still within the most daring and brave artistic expression.

Each one of these films has an amazing mixture of pointed story telling and still manages to reveal a huge area of honest discourse concerning the ambiguity of living with and without the observation of divine revelation. The timeless nature of the ten commandments reaches well beyond religious circles trying to figure out if the ten commandments are still relevant in a particular form of dogmatism. This is the power of film to weave reason, emotion, history, and story together into something that directs us to the transcendent and forces us to slow down, know ourselves, and perhaps see a glimpse of God’s intent towards and for us.

• The Dekalog on IMDB
• Krzysztof Kieslowski

Categories: Film, Faith, Art, Bible Study
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I watch the subtle movement of the surface of the water, and the watermarks made progressively as the piece dries; it stirs my heart to note details of life that we often take for granted. Beauty often resides in the peripheries of our lives. We walk past such humble miracles, such as the babe in the manger in a little village of Bethlehem, all the time. In the frantic pace of life, we need to slow down and simply observe natural forces around us and create out of that experience. What makes us truly human may not be how fast we are able to accomplish a task but what we experience fully, carefully, and quietly in the process.

~Makoto Fujimura, Refractions

• 
  Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture
  Author: Makoto Fujimura

I have always enjoyed the attention to detail that the arts bring, when you fully enter into your work… you do lose yourself there. I am just now starting to return to a few art forms that require patience, and everything that is slowly cumbersome about analog processes… but still so much more enjoyable and freeing than watching progress bars creep along in my favorite check box laden graphics application.

Categories: Art, Books
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“The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”

~Andy Crouch, Culture Making

• 
  Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
  Author: Andy Crouch

Categories: Culture, Quotes, Art, Books
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