Spring is undoubtedly a season of rebirth, but in springtime, especially early, we also discover a tension between hope and our human tendency to despair that will shape us if we let it.

Before gardens rise from the dirt, seeds must first die in burial.

Before Christ rose from the tomb, he had to be stricken, smitten, and afflicted.

Before Easter comes Lent, and even as God makes all things new, we must still journey on, often through pain and suffering.

Where do stories and songs and art fit into all this?

Should they be positive and encouraging, giving us a sentimental escape?

Or should they portray the harsh reality of life as it appears to be, disregarding hope if the artist doesn't feel it?

A couple weeks ago, the Anselm Society partnered with the NICAEA Study Center, a Christian study center active in Colorado Springs, to host an event exploring this question.

You can learn more about the Nicaea Study Center at the end of this episode.

We recorded the event to share with you.

As a bonus episode on the podcast, we were delighted to host our friend Wesley Vanderlucht from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary to give this talk.

Doctor Vanderlucht is the author of Beauty is Oxygen, Finding a Faith that Breathes.

He teaches theology and is the acting director of the Leighton Ford Center for Theology, the Arts and Gospel Witness at Gordon Conwell.

Dr.

Vanderlucht also Co founded the organization Kinship Plot, which is a community dedicated to uplifting, resonant relationships.

Doctor Vanderlucht has served in many ministry roles and is an advocate for beauty and the arts.

He is a kindred spirit and a friend to the Anthem Society.

We were very excited to have him with us.

I hope this talk is as strengthening for you as it was for us.

Well, good evening everyone.

I'm so glad you're here.

And I think that pie, whether the mathematical formula or the edible dessert, is a beautiful thing to celebrate.

So I think it's entirely fitting.

I love it and even though I I've just recently written on beauty, I'm not really talking about that tonight directly.

I heard about this theme of hope and despair and dialogue with Brad some and and so looking more specifically at the issue of hope and artistry, gritty hope and the gift of art from sentimentality to you, catastrophe.

And I think you'll hear some bits about beauty in there, even if I'm not addressing it directly.

And of course, we can go anywhere you want to go in the questions.

In 2015, American journalist and writer Tanahisi Coates wrote a powerful book called Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In the book, which is written in the form of a letter to his son, Coates issues a warning against any art that tries to provide what he calls specious hope, particularly given what it's like to inhabit a body of color in the United States.

And Coates argues that it's the responsibility of an artist to look unflinchingly at reality and then present it in a way that connects with others and resonates with others.

In an article called Hope and the Artist, The Virtues of Enlightenment over Feel Good ISM, which was published in The Atlantic in 2015, Coates challenges the notion that artists should in any way aim at providing hope.

By contrast, he argues that the primary goal of art is enlightenment, which he describes as the rendering of dead stats into something touchable.

Coats doesn't actually fault any artists for seeking to express hope, if that feeling is authentic and genuine.

But he then delivers a warning against any artist that is oriented toward hope as a goal.

Here's what he writes, he says hope for hope's sake, hope as tautology.

Hope because hope, hope because I said so, is the enemy of intelligence.

One can say the same about the opposite pull of despair.

Neither neither of these, hope or despair, are wrong.

They each reflect human sentiment, much like anger, sadness, Lovejoy.

Art that uses anything, any of these, to say something larger interests me.

Art that takes any of these as its aim does not.

The Burgers of Calais doesn't need to smile for me.

And I don't need Macbeth to be a fairy tale.

Even our fairy tales are rarely fairy tales.

So that's Tommy Heely Coats.

That's his challenge that he has levied against people, like people of faith, who are oriented toward hope.

And so how do we respond to Coats?

How should artists of faith, artists for whom hope is essential as faith and love are?

How do we respond to Coats's thesis that art should not aim at hope?

And to what extent is hopeful art, however you might define that, the enemy of intelligence?

When does hopeful art degenerate into sentimental art?

And can you be a serious artist and still love fairy tales?

That's what we're going to get.

But I want to begin with an agreement with Coats.

I resonate totally with Coats concern that art oriented toward specious hope.

It's an important qualifier.

Superficial hope can easily and does often become the enemy of enlightenment and a feel good opiate for spiritually inclined masses.

Now an all too easy target.

I think often for over sentimentalized, so so-called hopeful art is the paintings of late American artist Thomas Kincaid, widely known as the painter of light.

Kincaid's stated purpose was to bring light into people's lives and to help them feel good.

Whatever his actual motives, making people feel good is a really good business plan, and Kincaid once explained that the success of his paintings lies from his goal, to quote, portray a world without the fall, a world without evil, a world with nothing to elicit anxiety.

Or if you don't know Kincaid, take the 2013 song Happy by Pharrell Williams.

He wrote that for Despicable Me Two, and it's sore to the top of the charts.

I think my latest check is that the music video has been viewed more than 1.4 billion times on YouTube.

And so the video and the follow up project, 24 Hours of Happy, which is super addicting.

By the way, don't start watching 24 Hours of Happy it.

It just features people of all shapes and sizes and locations around the world dancing to his song, dancing the whole song, I should say around the clock for 24 hours And and the video is infectious.

But the more you you watch it, the more you can begin to actually believe what it says, which is happiness is the truth and can't nothing bring me down.

But in the real world we live in, is this some kind of joyful resistance or is it sentimentality gone wild?

Back when Twitter was a thing, someone tweeted something about Farrell's song, how he hated it, and Farrell retweeted that with one word.

Same.

And that exploded the social media spheres, and people started admitting their annoyance and dislike of the song, arguing in the threads that it's emotionally simplistic, it's sonically boring, it's lyrically naive.

In other words, it's classic sentimentality.

And it may make you feel good for a while, but it doesn't stick like a sugar rush.

So the world of Kincaid paintings, Feral song.

It's not the world we live in, right?

It's not the world experienced viscerally, be it by Coates and his son, nor the world experienced by Kincaid, who died at the age of 54 from acute intoxication, nor the world experienced by Feral, whose cousin was shot and killed by Virginia police.

And and this kind of sentimentalized art fails by Coats's rule or standard to make our actual world touchable.

And while some may argue that enjoying a Kincaid landscape or singing along to happy, which I've done, I admit it, it's fine, can get your mind off trouble and maybe even get your mind on the reality of God and his promised future.

But even in that reality, Christ still has wounds.

Even in that reality, there still exists what poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called a pied beauty.

This reality is not all light and shallow happiness.

It incorporates, as Hopkins writes in his poem, pied beauty.

All things counter, original, spare, strange, whatever is fickle, freckled, who knows how, With sweet, slow, sweet sour dazzle.

A dim he fathers forth whose beauty is past change.

Praise him.

And who are we really to improve on this cosmic pied beauty, The undulating contrast of dappled things, the interplay between light and shadow.

So whatever hopeful art is, it must be something more than just a landscape of light in which happiness is the truth.

The Christian philosopher and art critic Calvin Sayreveld once wrote this in reference to sentimentalized art.

This is from his wonderful book A Christian Critique of Art and Literature Committed to You.

He says all such sincere Sunday schoolish artificial projects are pseudo Christian and they're innocuous presentations, not only devastate understanding art, but also misrepresent and take the bite and the grit and the life out of our Christian commitment.

Artists who approach their making from a Christian commitment, in other words, should be alert to what Jeremy Begby calls the pathologies of sentimentality.

So Begby leads the initiative and Theology in the Arts at Duke University.

He identifies 3 primary pitfalls of sentimentality of this pathology #1 is misrepresenting or evading evil #2 is placating the emotions, and #3 is avoiding costly action.

I want to look at those a little bit in light of how art can avoid those errors and move us toward a more gritty hope.

Let's take that first pitfall.

Sentimental art flirts with or explicitly goes about evading or trivializing evil.

Good art should not ignore, like a Thomas Kincaid painting, that we live in this world, this fallen, groaning, broken world.

Good art does not naively assume that all human beings are basically good, and society is inevitably moving toward greater harmony and justice.

The role of art, good art, as Emily Dickinson says, is to tell all the truth and tell its slants, which includes slant truth telling about the struggle between good and evil that constitutes the drama of history and all of our lives.

Art tells slant the truth and reality of cosmic struggle, personal sins, systemic evil.

Art can tell all that truth slant while at the same time bearing witness to hope the same way the Scriptures do.

Telling truth about the insanity of our sin, the flourishing of injustice, the meaninglessness of life under the sun, while also bearing witness to a God who took on our sin and ended the curse and defeated death.

A God who loves us and is subversively and surely making all things new, including people like you and me.

So God is making all things new in Christ by the Spirit.

And yet the world is not currently remade.

The hope we have, therefore, cannot be naive nor sentimental.

We have hope, yes, but it's a hope that takes seriously our personal and cosmic cries for healing and for justice, all of which can and should be expressed through our art.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, in the midst of the Nazi regime, the only one who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.

I think he's stating that very wisely.

And the difficulty and urgency of telling truth slant about the the ruinous glory of the world, the Sinner St.

quality of our lives is precisely why we need artists.

The vocation of artists is to tell all the truth, but tell it slant elusively, imaginatively, holistically.

Whereas didactic presentations of truth textbooks, textbook statements about the intermingling of evil and hope, I think have a harder time holding on to or holding together the paradox and and some of the tensions of the gritty and the glorious.

But the gift of art is the ability to tell all the truth until it's slant in a way that get gets behind some of our natural defenses and moves us and transforms us.

To quote again from Cervelt, biblically true arts will show the hurt and the laughter, the thorough, going kiaroscuro to flowers and desires and prayers alike.

It will let a childlike gladness of hope well up through the total groaning of all creation for the great day still to come.

So you have a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorites, who can in literally in one breath almost be telling slant the truth of hurt and also the truth of hope the same time.

So you get a couple lines like from his poem God's Grandeur.

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod, and all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil, and wears man's smudge and shares man's smell.

The soil is bare now, nor can feet feel being shot.

And then right into the slant.

Truth of hope.

And for all this nature is never spent there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

And though the last lights off the black W went oh, morning at the brown brink eastward springs.

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breasts and with, ah, bright wings.

He's doing both at the same time.

So I think a poem like that is the kind of art that bears witness to hope, but not in a way that evades evil or is is falling prey to sentimentality.

This is not hope for hope's sake, hope as tautology, Hope because hope as Coats warns about.

It's hope that emerges through the Crucible of trotting, trotting, trotting, and everything being smeared and and and seared so good art can witness not merely to a feel Good Hope, but to a gritty 1.

Only art that expresses A specious hope, as Coates calls it, will be emotionally self indulgent.

That's the second trap of sentimentality.

Art that taps into true hope is hope that is deep and it's thick, which has the power not only to elicit emotions, to expose our emotions, but actually to heal and even reshape them.

And this will only be the case if we view hope as something that includes but is more than mere human sentiment.

This is a key point thinking, interacting with anyone who doesn't share this this imaginary.

In Coates's article about hope and the artist, he identifies hope and despair as opposite poles on the spectrum of human sentiment.

I don't think they fit equally on that spectrum.

He affirms that if an artist genuinely feels any of these things, then, well, it's fitting to express them.

And I think he's right about that if we're talking about feeling.

But feeling hopeful, I believe, is different then receiving the gift of hope and seeking to bear witness to that gift through art.

From a Christian perspective, hope is less of a feeling than it is a revelation.

A revelation of a new future, the gift of a new story to inhabit, a new identity to embrace.

And and so hope is a it's a holy spirited, gifted confidence.

So feeling is involved in a God who has promised to make all things new, even in the midst of feeling lament and sorrow and despair and everything else.

And so seen in that way, hope as a gift, not just as sentiment, art can witness to hope and not merely make us feel good, but actually has the potential to reshape us emotionally, to give us the capacity to feel the fullness of human emotion, including both grief for what is and joy for what will be.

I mentioned Jeremy Bagby.

He's he's a composer and a musician and a theologian.

I commend his work to you.

In in his book Resounding Truth, he writes about the particular power of of music to voice not only what we currently feel, but even what we could or perhaps should feel.

He writes, is this not what Bob Dylan did for a whole generation in the 1960s?

Is this not what we shall overcome did for thousands in the civil rights struggle?

It changed those who sang it.

It helped them find fresh hope and courage.

And is this not what the greatest hymns do?

They not only help us sing what we already experienced emotionally.

To some extent, they also educate and reform our emotional experience.

Now, of course, singing about what we already experience is a beautiful and wonderful thing as well, and part of the gift of of art.

Giving expression to human experience, including giving expression to pain, to trauma.

It's a necessary part of actually developing gritty hope, and it's a part of the gift of art that out of the bentness of suffering we get the bent notes of the Blues right out of a sense of God forsakenness, we get psalms of lament.

So expressing pain can begin the process of healing and developing and clinging to a kind of weighty gritty hope.

And there's a powerful scene in the film 12 Years a Slave.

Has anyone seen this film?

I think illustrates this really well.

It's a film that tells a story about about Solomon, who's kidnapped in the North.

He was forced to be a slave for 12 years in Mississippi.

And you know, without a doubt, his emotional life.

It's fear, it's anger, it's desperation, it's depression.

Hope had literally been beaten out of him.

But in the midst of all that pain and suffering, there's this really moving scene where we see the enslaved community gathering to sing these these songs of lament mixed in with hope.

Songs like Roll Jordan Roll, and which through their melodies and lyrics and repetition, it's slowly coaxing Solomon to sing out of his pain and toward hope.

I think that's what a lot of really good art does move us to to express our pain toward an emotion we don't yet have, toward a reality in which we don't even yet live.

And if art can express hope in a way that does not evade evil, but tells all the truth, slant.

And if heart art can express hope in a way that avoids emotional self indulgence in order to engage and shape the fullness of our emotional life, then this kind of hopeful art will be well poised to dodge that third pitfall of sentimentality, failure to generate costly action.

Sometimes the very activity of art making and art appreciating is accused of being negligent.

Have you heard this argument before?

That art distracts us from the real work of justice and loving our neighbor and mercy and compassion.

So the objection is that art is essentially it's a waste of time and money.

It's like fiddling while Rome burns.

And of course, some art does that.

Some art can wall us into apathy, cause us to remain, I think, tragically disconnected with the way things really are from costly action.

But often art that that does that has already fallen into the two, the first two pitfalls that it's ignoring reality and it's placating our emotions.

OK.

By contrast, the art has had the art that has the courage to make reality touchable while alluding to the possibility of reality remade has an essential role to play in any movement for change in our lives.

Personal transformation, social justice.

Whatever the case may be, art has the power to help us imagine a new reality, which can then motivate our individual and collective action, even within situations that that may seem hopeless.

In his book Christianity, Arts and Transformation, South African theologian John Degrucci makes a compelling case for the necessity of hope and arts in the face of injustice.

The power of arts to to bear witness to that hope.

So, he writes, this hope is about the production of a new reality for a damaged society.

This is a far cry from an easy optimism about the future, but it is also a refusal to succumb to despair.

Hope alone provides the vision and dynamic for a dynamic social praxis.

During the struggle against apartheid, keeping hope alive was of the essence.

To lose hope was to surrender the power to bring about change, and the same remains true for the process of social hearing and transformation.

In a post apartheid era, keeping hope alive is universally one of the most urgent demands of our time.

As in the need to offer alternative ways of conceiving reality and how we envision the future.

And that's his bridge to talk about the arts, goes on to explain how artistic creativity, any kind of creativity, even when it doesn't have hope as its primary aim, can be indicative of hope simply because it's making something new out of the reality that is.

So he writes, this artistic creativity can never be satisfied with Nietzsche's nihilism, even when it despairs of the world.

For it is of the essence of creativity that it continually imagines new futures as it seeks to transcend the cul de sacs of the past.

Hope enables us to transgress boundaries of what is presently deemed realistic and possible.

Another theologian, Wendy Farley, puts it this way.

The very act of creation is a refusal to accept tragedy as final.

Creativity, perhaps paradoxically, allows us to grieve and lament even as it testifies by its very existence to the remnant that survives.

And that's the dynamic that TA Nehisi Coates misses, that even when an artist is not intending to communicate anything hopeful, the very act of making something new challenges despair.

A work of art encounters us with new mixtures of sounds, new combinations of colors, new sequences of words, new amalgamations of movements.

And human artistry is never creation out of nothing, creation X nihilo, but it's creation out of anything, creation X aliquo, a fashioning of something new, anything new out of what currently is.

And art is therefore a testimony to the possibility of newness.

No matter what, Artistry is a living, breathing alternative to ultimate tragedy.

You might be familiar with the story of Vedron Smelovich, cellist who gained notoriety for playing Albinones Adagio and G Minor in the ruins of a downtown Sarajevo market following a brutal attack.

And what made him notorious in playing that adagio is that he didn't just play it once, but he played it over and over for 22 consecutive days.

And as one writer puts it, straddling debris balanced between wreckage, he drew his bow and filled those aching ruins with music.

He's not denying the existence of suffering and death, but he divide defied death with a song.

He showed how something new could arise out of the wreckage.

And that engenders hope.

That's what the arts can do.

The arts are a gift for our battered lives because they help us to imagine new possibilities, help us at least begin to wonder what if?

What if, you know, when Jesus began his public ministry, declaring good news, providing hope to those weary from centuries of waiting, battered by the Roman Empire?

His preferred method of communication, stories, images, metaphors, Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, like yeast, like a hidden treasure, like a net, like a banquet with the most unlikely people and and by using this artful form of communication, Jesus is helping his hearers imagine the now and not yet reality of God's presence in Kingdom.

He is telling slant the truth of God's Kingdom through stories and images, helping listeners in every culture.

Now imagine a new economy, a new reality, a new family in which the last are first and the first are last.

And so, as we inhabit these stories, we are invited to imagine a new Kingdom emerging within the shadow of empire, heaven and earth merging, beginning now and on into eternity.

Art can reveal the the brokenness and get us in touch with all that needs to be restored, and then surprise us with delight and remind us of our deepest longings.

There were some who listened to Jesus parables, both then and now, that dismissed them as mere fairy tales, nice stories, little or no bearing to reality.

And to circle back to Coats's words or his question, can't we just do away with fairy tales?

At the same time?

There's a tender moment in In Between the World and Me, his book, where he wonders if he's missing something in Speaking of his distance from the church, he writes.

I often wonder if in that distance, I've missed something, some notion of cosmic hope, some wisdom beyond my mean physical perception of the world, Something beyond the body that I might have transmitted to you, my son.

And I just wonder, what if the something that Coats could have transmitted to his son was the gift of fairy tales?

Fairy tales that exist not because of wishful thinking and sentimental thoughts, but because good endings are just as real, if not more real than tragic ones.

And if that's true, then fairy tales introduce us to the way things really are.

Broken, yes, but capable of repair beyond what we can actually imagine.

They introduced us to the possibility of you catastrophe, that wonderful world word I'm finally getting to in the subtitle of my talk tonight, You catastrophe.

From sentimentality to you catastrophe did not invent that word.

I wish I had.

It's a great word comes from the writer JRR Tolkien, author of Beloved Lord of the Rings.

And he uses that word, you catastrophe, to describe the nature of fairy tales, to move through catastrophe to a good and happy ending.

And in doing so, Tolkien argues that fairy tales are not an escape from reality.

It's key to his argument.

But they're actually an introduction to primary reality, the one true story, a story that is propelled by grace and will end with the joyous transformation of tragedy into comedy.

He has this delightful little essay called on fairy stories.

I'll just read a paragraph, he says.

The consolation of fairy stories, the joy of the happy ending, or more correctly, of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous turn.

For there is no true end to any fairy tale.

This joy, which is one of the things which fairy stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially escapist or fugitive in its fairy tale or other world setting.

It is a sudden and miraculous grace never to be counted on to recur.

It does not deny the existence of this catastrophe, sorrow and failure.

The possibility of these is actually necessary to the joy of deliverance.

It denies, in the face of much evidence, if you will, universal final defeat.

And in so far is Evangelion, A fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

And he's talking about the kind of art he's trying to create as he's writing Lord of the Rings.

Yes, it's art that brings us in touch with reality, but it's also art that gives us a picture of what could be that includes within its space for for sudden and miraculous grace for you, catastrophe.

And I think one of the reasons why Lord of the Rings is so powerful and so popular, frankly, is because it's the kind of art that can truly inspire us and give us gritty hope which will last and actually enable us to persevere even when things feel hopeless and to maintain hope in that ultimate new catastrophe when God will make all things new.

And we need that today more than ever.

And so I just want to close today with some some wise words from a biblical theologian, NT right, who beautifully ties together some of these themes and shows how art can provide gritty hope.

The Christian contribution to the world of the arts is therefore neither to collapse into sentimentality, to murmur the easy half truths which comfort for a while, but wither in the face of the horror of the world, nor to connive at that brutalism which under the guise of telling it like it is.

That's Coats denies the very possibility of hope.

The Christian contribution to the arts must lie along the line of listening to the longing and groaning of creation, a longing which is itself multi dimensional because it is the evidence of the spirits groaning and longing within the world and expressing and portraying that longing both in its present agony and in its certain hope.

Thanks.

All right.

So we have some time for questions.

So I, I think this is how it's supposed to work.

If you have a question, raise your hand and I'll come racing over to you with the microphone so everybody can hear the question.

So go.

Kind of strike while the iron's hot.

You use the word slant in a way that I have not heard before.

I wondered if you could kind of help me with that.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm still on.

Right.

Yeah.

OK.

So, yeah, tell all the truth, but tell.

It's slant that comes from Emily Dickinson's poem where she's talking about it's a defense of her poetry, but it's a defense of all artistry because she says that there is a certain success that ends circuit lies because she says the truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.

So there's a sense of if truth is presented to us directly and This is why Jesus taught in parables.

It's just like this is exactly what's going to happen when it's going to happen.

There would have been an immediate rejection of that.

You know, natural defenses go up, but also there wouldn't have been the kind of genuine reception that happens when you come into a story, when you start contemplating an image and you have an aha moment, you know, So this is David as he's listening to the prophet explain the story about a man's best loved sheep and it was taken and slaughter.

And he's like, how dare he?

That man must be killed, right?

He's got him in the story.

He's like, that's you, bro.

That's what Telling Truth Slant does, is it gets us involved in a way that we are either going to have to reject it or receive it.

And that was the response to Jesus Parables.

Yep.

Hey, so you know, I agree with you, but I'm wondering if you think that sometimes art that is simple and basic and basically still based in Eden.

You know what I mean?

Like the dumb sitcom, the just ridiculous little picture of a bird.

If there isn't justification sometimes for art that hasn't experienced the fall yet, because we've experienced the fall and we just need a little break.

Do you know what I mean?

So, yeah.

What do you think of that?

Yeah.

For sure, No, absolutely.

A couple of things I want to say about that one.

One is not all art needs to do everything, you know, and some artists are particularly gifted to enter the big one true story at a certain point.

Sometimes it's the goodness of creation.

They're really good at portraying that.

Sometimes it's the brokenness of the world, sometimes transformation or whatever the case may be.

And you know, so, so that's something to consider.

And also, I think, yeah, it's, it's OK to just have a break in the Daydream.

You know, I think the, the vision I was trying to put forth is the, the overall role of Christians in the arts.

Like what, what can we make that's a unique contribution?

And I think it's telling the whole story and telling the whole story slant.

But there may be times because not all one artist can do it all and artists have different gifts to, to not focus on the whole and just take a little part.

And it's the goodness of bird song, you know, that's great.

I was in in Nashville just a couple days ago, and there was an exhibit, this wonderful artist whose name I'm forgetting in the moment.

But she has just taken these little parchments that she made and made marks in them as she's listening to birds and as a record of her attentiveness to birdsong that has just a lightness to it, you know, that draws you to the beauty of that.

But, you know, her art should exist along other art that illumines other aspects of reality in other parts of the story.

Yeah.

Good.

Is there a responsibility that we all have to be participants in, in creating beauty in different forms?

There's there's a lot of, you know, the the idea of developing good tastes of recognizing goodness and beauty when we see it and and celebrating it, admiring it may be commending it to others, but given thank you for your talk tonight, by the way, but given what you said tonight, is there is there something that comes out of this?

It's almost a duty for us to even just attempt to create beauty.

Yeah, absolutely, 100%.

Yeah.

So every single human being is creative.

We are made in the image of a maker to make things.

And our making should follow the pattern of of God's making, you know, And I love how Dorothy Sayers talks about it in her wonderful book, Mind of the Maker.

It's like we're all we're all created in God's image to make things.

Could be a spreadsheet, could be a Symphony, could be a garden, you know, could be, could be a wonderful painting.

And we all have ideas for things to create.

We all have certain gifts doing this because she talks about it as the triangle of the Trinity.

So we all have the idea to create things and activity or energy to bring them into the world and inspiration to do so that also inspires others.

And that our ideas and our making and the power of those things should be oriented to truth and goodness and beauty, you know, and should.

That's how they give glory to God and, and are good for the world and our neighbors.

So could be absolutely anything, but we all are participating in the story in that way.

Yeah.

Good evening.

My name is Mac Pitt.

Thank you so much for your talk tonight.

It's been wonderful.

So I am a, a college student.

I'm studying theater.

I'm actually also studying communication.

So don't worry, I will be making money.

I, I attend a Christian university and part of our theater department have been involved in a lot of shows.

And one of the, the points that has come up throughout my time at this particular university is that we will come up with ideas for shows that you want to do, shows that have been written.

And there's a lot of pushback from our, our Christian community, from leadership within our school saying that the Christian message is not Christian enough.

That to the, the art that we are trying to portray does not have a, an inherent Christian message.

And in spite of argument, there is a, there's, there's just a bit of a disconnect there.

So just what your thoughts are on that as far as being in Christian community and what does portrayal of art look like?

I sigh because it's very common as you know, and unfortunately, I just think when when truth is the leading filter for the kind of art we produce often sacrifices beauty and excellence and the slantness that makes art art, you know, So try to cast a vision for, you know, there's of course, art always has a message.

Sometimes it's more discernible than other times.

And sometimes that indiscernibility that in the uncontainability of the truth of the artwork is actually it's gift because it keeps us exploring.

It ushers us into a reality which is more of a mystery rather than something that we can explain in bullet points to someone, you know.

So now I get needing to make choices about what's being staged or screened or read, given the fittiness of of the community.

And, you know, so often it's just very contextual.

And depending on the context, I think it's important to gently push toward a a more robust, like truth, goodness, and beauty approach to the kind of artwork we're engaging with.

I'd like to know what you think about satire and its role in creativity.

I I when you talked about Thomas Kincaid, I think of this, this image I saw one time of like a like a very picturesque Thomas Kincaid landscape and then like a stormtrooper sky.

Yeah, Yeah.

Star Wars.

I've seen that too.

Coming in and like, you know, battling down and there's a real truth to that.

But also like the Babylon Bee and other other satirists and interested in what you think of that.

Yeah, it's, it's wonderful because it makes strange the familiar.

It's what satire does so well.

And, and I think a lot of the best art, whether it's satire or not, is presenting to us with a sort of unfamiliar familiarity.

Like, Oh yeah, I have that conversation in the grocery store all the time.

And I've never noticed how absurd that is or how wonderful it is, you know, and, and also, I think the other gift of satire is just complexifying reality a bit.

So someone may say something and it means like 1010 different things.

And some of those things are difficult.

Some of them are funny, some of them are ridiculous, you know.

So I think it's one of the wonderful ways of telling truth slants and not taking ourselves too seriously as well, which is important importance of not being to earnest.

Hi, thank you so much for spending your evening with us.

I was glancing at your book, Beauty is Oxygen and the unique aspect that you bring of having a little O where we're supposed to stop and breathe.

And your talk tonight made me wonder.

And maybe you didn't mean this metaphor to go this far, so I apologize.

But if beauty is oxygen, then what would you say would be kind of carbon dioxide to our world?

Like, would you say it's sort of that sentimentality and despair or something to that effect?

And also my daughter has a question.

Oh, wonderful.

Go ahead.

What's the most beautiful pie I've ever seen and what made it beautiful?

Beautiful pie or play pie.

I love that.

I'm going to start with the easy question, which is growing up, my mom made these apple pies in the brown paper bag in the oven and stutch apple pie that I grew up having and most beautiful pie I've ever tasted.

It didn't always look so good, but it tasted really good.

You know, I've never really thought too much about the carbon dioxide part of it.

I've I've thought about how beauty is oxygen, not perfume.

Thought a lot about that because it's not merely nice and subjective and something for the privileged, you know, but carbon dioxide, I think it would be in anything that we are taking in in the world.

There's going to be the oxygen part of it and there's a part of it that we don't need.

I mean, because nothing is purely beautiful except God.

So I think, and maybe this is part of.

Sorry, what was your name again?

Theater student.

Yeah.

So maybe part of the encouragement too, in engaging with plays and films and such that aren't Christian, that have difficult content.

Is there some things in that we need to exhale and not keep meditating on, not keep as a part of our formation and discipleship journey, But it is coming to us with things that are truly beautiful that we need to take in.

So I think, I think probably I would go in the direction of discernment with that.

OK, I'm going to think about it more.

So we have time for one more question.

I see your hand.

But as Piper has reminded us, there is π to be had and conversation to be had.

So we'll do one more question, you know, and then π.

You have this triangle around art of truth, goodness and beauty.

Would you mind defining what you mean by goodness and beauty?

For I understand them to be kind of the same thing.

Good things are beautiful and and beautiful things are good.

So what exactly do you mean?

Sure.

Well, something that frustrates some people when they read beauty as oxygen is I don't really define beauty because, you know, beauty is the overflow of who God is.

How are you going to define that?

And, but I think it, it is a good way of what you're beginning to say of truth, goodness and beauty, that they are one in a, in the sense that Father, son and spirit are one.

And that you, you might say that beauty is the splendor of God.

And, you know, truth is the integrity of God and goodness is the, you know, it's the orientation of, of God toward love.

You know, so, so there's a relationship between all of them.

But I, I'm so passionate that I think a lot of times we have taken a truth first or a goodness first approach toward various things in life.

And a beauty first approach is just normally kind of how we live.

Like we're encountered by something first, the shape of it, you know, the form of it, the splendor of it.

And through beauty, we are drawn to goodness and truth.

Could we thank Doctor Vanderluck one more time?

Thanks, Ed.

So if you're like me, you have an instinct, an instinct that that tells you exactly where the pie is and it won't be a problem to find.

If you're not like me, it's through the doors and then down the stairs.

You could also just wait and find the instinctive pie people and just kind of follow them.

But it will be out that way.

But on behalf of the Ansem Society and then I see a study center, we want to thank you for coming out.

Enjoy some pie, some beautiful pie.