Art and Faith:
Much modern art - in general, I'm not a fan - seems to me to express faithlessness. Or, when it's good (but I don't know how modern Van Gogh, for example, is considered to be), it testifies to a struggle between faith and forms of thought and experience that leave us unconscious of it.
And of course there's always religious art, sometimes very striking and wonderful, that testifies to faith in the form of belief systems. Fine if you share the belief system; if you don't, then you appreciate the beauty but find the religious conviction aspect more or less off putting.
My favorite esthetic - just one I happen to know something about, I'm far from well educated in art - was what I found in the Romantic and Victorian poets and essayists of Britain. Writers like Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Arnold, and why am I forgetting his name (the author of Sartor Resartus) were doing two things in their work.
First, they were grappling in complete honesty with the changing world view and challenge to traditonal beliefs posed by science. Second, they fully acknowledged the heights of aspiration and moral passion that are no less factual and real than the facts that science is discovering.
To me, much of what they wrote testifies to faith and other spiritual realities in a way that showed the vitality of spiritual life. It was strikingly beautiful. At the same time, they remained poets and not prophets; to me, they never managed to come up with what I think is needed: the clear articulation of a basis for faith within our shared lived experience and not belief.
(I actually spent 25 years on this project myself, but have run into the fact that my manuscript won't be published. Really tried. But no "marketing platform" today means no publication, especially in nonfiction.)
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