Il Guercino's dramatic "Capturing Christ" (1621) @FitzMuseum_UK #art #twitart #Baroque pic.twitter.com/8LoBr5ptCs

— Paul Wadey (@pwadey) October 26, 2016

The Kiss of Judas. Christ is betrayed, and arrested. Painted panel wood, probably from an East Anglian rood screen, of c1470 now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. On the right, Peter draws his sword to cut off the high priest's servant's ear. pic.twitter.com/a3q7A3KRbm

— Simon Knott (@SimoninSuffolk) March 28, 2024

The cathedral had hoped for some years to give Austen a fitting tribute as a sculpture, Dean Ogle said. “The opportunity has now arisen with a significant number of private donors and small grant providers keen to see in place the splendid and sensitive design by the acclaimed sculptor Martin Jennings. These funds are restricted by the donors to this project only.

“We recognise that, at a time of cost inflation for so many people, of anxiety about the future, and conflict in society, the idea of bringing to fruition a statue of arguably Britain’s greatest literary figure could be seen as frivolous. Funding for the arts, be it for sculpture or any other medium, is always open to question, which we understand.

“However, with the enthusiastic support of our private donors and the wider benefit it will bring to Winchester, Hampshire, and many of the Austen fans nationally and worldwide, we consider this project should proceed.”

Read it all.

Winchester Cathedral has revealed the preliminary design of a proposed statue of Jane Austen, commissioned from the figurative sculptor Martin Jennings, to mark the 250th anniversary in 2025 of the novelist’s birth https://t.co/IcWSRjmVlv

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 5, 2024

Artist Che Lovelace was on his way to the coast on the Caribbean island of Trinidad to collect mud to use in carnival celebrations when he received a message that a church in the UK wanted him to create an artwork to commemorate the life of an African man he had never heard of.

Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was a respected abolitionist in 18th Century Britain – but, despite his significant role in the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, his story is not that well-known.

Cugoano was born in the Gold Coast, today’s Ghana. He was enslaved when he was 13 – captured with about 20 others as they were playing in a field.

His destination was the sugar plantations of the Caribbean island of Grenada. On board the ship taking him across the Atlantic Ocean, there was, as Cugoano writes, “nothing to be heard but the rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellow-men.”

Read it all.

Quobna Cugoano: London church honours Ghanaian-born freed slave and abolitionist https://t.co/cxpmv6lMkO

— BBC News Africa (@BBCAfrica) September 20, 2023

The Consistory Court of Oxford diocese has granted All Saints’, Dunsden, a faculty to install a new window to commemorate the First Word War poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), who had had connections with the church and the village.

All Saints’ is an attractive but unlisted village church, and the unopposed online faculty application was made by the Rector and the churchwarden. Owen lived in the village from 1911 to 1913, having come to Dunsden to act as lay assistant to the Vicar of All Saints’ at that time, the Revd Hubert Wigan. Both Owen’s parents and his sister are buried in the churchyard.

The proposed location for the new window is an existing single lancet window in the nave, facing south and next but one to the chancel. It is near to a memorial plaque that was dedicated to Owen in 1978 by the then Bishop of Oxford in the presence of the then Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. The existing window is to be dismantled and removed, and the glass retained for future use.

Read it all.

Wilfred Owen commemorative window to be installed in Oxford church https://t.co/0yF3rGF4TP

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) July 14, 2023

Il Guercino's dramatic "Capturing Christ" (1621) @FitzMuseum_UK #art #twitart #Baroque pic.twitter.com/8LoBr5ptCs

— Paul Wadey (@pwadey) October 26, 2016

‘The idea that there’s a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it. Actually, maybe even far-fetched to start with, but the idea that that same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in %$#$ and straw and poverty is genius, and brings me to my knees, literally. To me, as a poet, I am just in awe of that. It makes some sort of poetic sense. It’s the thing that makes me a believer, although it didn’t dawn on me for many years.’

–Bono as quoted in Cathleen Falsani, The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p.10, also cited by yours truly in yesterday’s sermon

Merry Christmas to all! 🎄

This timely artwork depicts a vibrant nativity scene full of movement and crowded with people, with the ‘Lamb of God’ seen in the immediate foreground.

🎨: The Adoration of the Magi, Franz von Rohden
oil on canvas, Rome 1851#SnowPlaceLikeUshaw pic.twitter.com/K3DAm5v2fy

— Ushaw Historic House, Chapels & Gardens (@ushawdurham) December 25, 2022

Gracious God, we offer thanks for the vision of Ralph Adams Cram, John LaFarge and Richard Upjohn, whose harmonious revival of the Gothic enriched our churches with a sacramental understanding of reality in the face of secular materialism; and we pray that we may honor thy gifts of the beauty of holiness given through them, for the glory of Jesus Christ; who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Born #OTD in 1863: Ralph Adams Cram, influential American architect of collegiate & ecclesiastical buildings, often in Gothic Revival style. He was Consulting Architect to Princeton University where his work included the Chapel, which was based on King's College Chapel, Cambridge pic.twitter.com/mdsXvDz1Yy

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) December 16, 2022

At the thousand-year-old Cathedral of Saint Sophia here, standing on an easel in front of a towering Baroque golden altar, is a new, freshly painted icon that’s just a foot square.

It depicts a 17th-century Cossack military commander with a long gray beard. His eyebrows are arched. His halo is a plain red circle. He looks humble beneath the immense mosaics that have glinted since the 11th century — through Kyiv’s sacking by the Mongols, its absorption into Poland, its domination by the Soviet Union.

No gold. No gemstones. This icon has been painted on three planks of knotty wood: the planks, I learn, of an ammunition box recovered from the devastated Kyiv suburb of Bucha. Out of Bucha’s mass graves, in the wake of terrifying Russian atrocities against civilians, something new has come to Saint Sophia: an image of mourning and resolve, of horror and courage, of a culture that will not give up.

Read it all.

What Ukraine is proving, amid the slaughter, is that civil society can make a difference against a superior military force, writes our critic, who traveled to Kyiv, Lviv and several heavily damaged towns. He found that cultural power is real power. https://t.co/Zl0kyxGMX0

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) July 15, 2022

Il Guercino's dramatic "Capturing Christ" (1621) @FitzMuseum_UK #art #twitart #Baroque pic.twitter.com/8LoBr5ptCs

— Paul Wadey (@pwadey) October 26, 2016

A famous statue at the University of Hong Kong marking the Tiananmen Square massacre was removed late on Wednesday.

The statue showed piled-up corpses to commemorate the hundreds – possibly thousands – of pro-democracy protesters killed by Chinese authorities in 1989.

It was one of the few remaining public memorials in Hong Kong commemorating the incident.

Its removal comes as Beijing has increasingly been cracking down on political dissent in Hong Kong.

The city used to be one of few places in China that allowed public commemoration of the Tiananmen Square protests – a highly sensitive topic in the country.

Read it all.

Hong Kong's Tiananmen Square statue removed https://t.co/wn3t0i1iYx

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) December 23, 2021

Today we remember Jerome, translator of the Scriptures. Rembrandt etching of Jerome & lion c.1633-35. [Prints 50/7] pic.twitter.com/jKAB8trIf7

— LambethPalaceLibrary (@lampallib) September 30, 2016

Fujimura believes that the Crucifixion reveals this theological vision in powerful ways. As he writes, “Christ’s redemptive work on the cross, Christ’s bloodshed, becomes an entry point of faith for all of us.” Artists, he argues, are uniquely able to witness to the hope of redemption amid brokenness by letting their artistry emerge from the traumas and tragedies of living in a fallen world:

Art literally feeds us through beauty in the hardest, darkest hours. … Through this wine of New Creation we can be given the eyes to see the vistas of the New, ears to hear the footsteps of the New, even through works by non-Christians in the wider culture.

Metaphors like “new wine” are among the key ways Fujimura expresses his vision. He draws heavily on the image of soil as a regenerative space where even our brokenness can testify, over time, to new creation. And he attests to the invaluable gift of tears as expressions of sanctification and consecration.

This theme of suffering is central to the book, as it is to Fujimura’s work as a fine artist. Art and Faith gives particular focus to the Japanese art form of Kintsugi, in which broken pottery is reformed using precious metals. The result, writes Fujimura, is a work of newly created beauty, “which now becomes more beautiful and more valuable than the original, unbroken vessel.”

In many insightful moments, Fujimura relates this redemptive vision of Kintsugi to experiences of suffering in his own life.

Read it all.

What acclaimed painter and writer Makoto Fujimura wants you to know about creativity and faith. https://t.co/Nd7VuQE3mH

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) May 2, 2021

Rembrandt’s Ecco homo (1634) was almost certainly intended to serve for an engraving, for private meditation at home.
In good Dutch Protestant fashion, it closely follows the text of John’s Gospel – the clock at the sixth hour, the rabble shouting that they have no king but Caesar.
As onlookers, it forces us to confront the question, Who is this man? Is he a king? and if so, what kind of king? Neil MacGregor reflects on one of the National Gallery’s most important paintings.

Read it all.

From the BBC, Good Friday reflections on a Rembrandt https://t.co/6nIXAGl5cU

— Lucy Ferguson (@LucyFergusonDHM) April 2, 2021

The Betrayal of #Christ by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) [1591-1666] with comment by #BaylorUniversity‘s Heidi Hornik @ChristianCent March 28, 2018, p. 55 #HolyWeek2018 #HolyWeek #MaundyThursday #christology #judas #bible #art #history #italy pic.twitter.com/6BJ8hUzC8f

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 30, 2018

The Betrayal of #Christ by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) [1591-1666] with comment by #BaylorUniversity‘s Heidi Hornik @ChristianCent March 28, 2018, p. 55 #HolyWeek2018 #HolyWeek #MaundyThursday #christology #judas #bible #art #history #italy pic.twitter.com/6BJ8hUzC8f

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 30, 2018

Mariani stands apart from this. His poetry, as explained in my essay, restores the term “confessional” to its sacramental significance. It is not a secret diary blown open by the wind or a police blotter plunging downward in a column of newsprint, as it were, but a prayerful record of self-discovery made in the presence of God. Saint Augustine’s Confessions is the most obvious antecedent alongside those distinctly modern features of his poetry that come from Lowell among others. I return to Mariani’s work, once again, because his own discussion of the vocation of the Catholic poet seems such a fruitful point of departure in answering the question, what must the Catholic artist do, in our day or in any day?

For his answer, Mariani draws our attention finally and above all to the example of Saint Paul, and to surprising effect. In the very center of the Acts of the Apostles, we watch as Paul comes to Athens; he finds a great “market place” of ideas, where “Epicurean and Stoic philosophers” meet him amid the Jews and gentiles of a city that, as Paul himself proclaims, must be “very religious” (17:18; 22). Very religious indeed, as the city is chock full of idols; their various devotions are multiplied by their decadent curiosity, which Luke describes by recording that “all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21). This is not the Athens of Plato, where the question of philosophy was a question of life and death, but the Athens of the Roman Empire, where Roman curiosity has become a kind of indulgent decadence, a place where interest in ideas was only increased by a doubt that any of them finally were to be credited and adopted. They had an interest in wisdom but little hope that anyone actually could be wise.

These pagans had, however, arrived at an intellectual maturity, where philosophical reflection had deepened traditional religion until the bold natural theology of Aristotle, with its prime mover and final cause, and Plato’s absolutely transcendent Good, understood as one god, supreme, father of all, had become something like the common sense of all educated persons.[2] They represent therefore an unfortunate but familiar coupling: genuine intellectual sophistication, rigorous refinement, and decadent unseriousness.

Saint Paul, as he comes to address these pagans in the Areopagus, appeals to both dimensions of their character. To their sound metaphysics and natural theology, he proclaims that the “unknown god” at last has been given a name and may be known to each person most intimately: “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth . . . is not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’”(17:24; 27-28). More subtly, he corrects their clever unseriousness, by wryly observing, “I perceive that in every way you are very religious,” and by provoking them to recall that, beneath decadent curiosity, lies a genuine eros to know the truth and to be saved, to “seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him” (17:22; 27).

Read it all.

“It is my argument that the Christian artist must implicitly begin, as Mariani insistently begins, in the interior self-knowledge that springs forth on the lips of the Christian as testimony, confession, martyrdom.” – James Matthew Wilson https://t.co/NcpmM2Wzth #poet #artist

— Mike Rippy (@mike_rippy) March 16, 2020

Blessed Feast of #Pentecost2019 (Art: Jean II Restout, 1732) #Pentecost #christianity #majorfeastdays pic.twitter.com/inh4mfpoKG

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) June 9, 2019

The Betrayal of #Christ by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) [1591-1666] with comment by #BaylorUniversity‘s Heidi Hornik @ChristianCent March 28, 2018, p. 55 #HolyWeek2018 #HolyWeek #MaundyThursday #christology #judas #bible #art #history #italy pic.twitter.com/6BJ8hUzC8f

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 30, 2018

Ailey started the company at the height of the Civil Rights movement so African-American dancers could soar, and its performances have been inspiring people on and off the stage ever since. Watch it all from NBC News.

The #gardenofgethsemane by Carl Block, the acclaimed Danish artist. A moving and tender image whether you have a faith or none pic.twitter.com/T5g423VzqI

— Beech Genealogy (@GenealogyBeech) April 13, 2017

Today we remember Jerome, translator of the Scriptures. Rembrandt etching of Jerome & lion c.1633-35. [Prints 50/7] pic.twitter.com/jKAB8trIf7

— LambethPalaceLibrary (@lampallib) September 30, 2016

The study, published by the American Academy of Ophthalmology, focuses specifically on medical students studying ophthalmology–the medical field focused on the eyes–because so much of that discipline relies on doctors using observation to examine and diagnose patients. For the study, 18 first-year medical students took art observation classes, where they had six-hour-and-a-half sessions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, while a control group also composed of 18 first-yearmedical students did not. None of the students had prior art training….

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In Christchurch, New Zealand, one of the world’s most unprepossessing contemporary churches manages to be among the most spectacular and celebrated. Colloquially called the “Cardboard Cathedral”—officially, Transitional Cathedral—the potentially temporary structure was designed by Shigeru Ban (b. 1957), the 2014 Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect. Mr. Ban—who combined his native training with graduate work at New York’s Cooper Union, where he was strongly influenced by his professor John Hejduk’s revisionist views of modernism—has been celebrated for his use of unusual materials in creating buildings that can be rapidly constructed following disasters. He has also designed more conventional projects: the Japanese Pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany, and a couple of museums (Centre Pompidou-Metz in France and the Aspen Art Museum in the U.S.).

The Christchurch project, which Mr. Ban worked on pro bono, came about after the 2011 earthquake severely damaged Anglican Christchurch Cathedral (1864-1904), rendering it unusable for liturgical purposes—a partial ruin, subject to disagreements about whether to restore and rebuild or start from scratch. The new structure is a few blocks away, on the site of another church destroyed by the earthquake. A court decision—insurance money couldn’t pay the costs of a temporary building—made private fundraising necessary (about $5 million, including overruns). Dedicated in August 2013, its modest exterior hides a majestic interior. Is it a large A-frame house, oddly misplaced in mid-city? But the church also appears descended from the hall churches of the late Middle Ages, whose radical design shift created wide-open spaces, less encumbered by the massive basilica columns that impeded sight lines, with interiors more useful as preaching churches, a development especially important with the growth of Protestantism in the 16th century.

Architecture’s tenet “truth to material” spans fields as disparate as the Arts and Crafts movement and brutalism, but Mr. Ban’s church suggests new by-ways of this principle.

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Soaring performances of songs from “Cats” and “Les Misérables” are unusual fare for a prison. But on May 3rd an inmate at Leicester prison brought an audience to their feet with his renditions. The recital was part of a TEDx conference, a popular lecture series that had never before been held in a British jail. In the midst of a prisons crisis, with violence against inmates and officers at record levels and crippling staff shortages, the event is an encouraging example of smaller efforts to improve conditions.

On a stage covered in prisoners’ art, inmates thundered the words of Shakespeare. An officer recited his own poetry: “I could tell you tales that would make you laugh…tales that would turn your stomach, tales that would break your heart,” he intoned. Organising the event was a logistical nightmare, says Phil Novis, the governor at HMP Leicester. But the enthusiasm of all involved suggests it was worth it.

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Suggestions that as many as half the 42 Church of England cathedrals are in danger of closing as a result of continuing financial mismanagement have been dismissed by the Bishop of Stepney, the Rt Revd Adrian Newman.

The Dean of Lichfield, the Very Revd Adrian Dorber, called the stories “grossly erroneous”.

Dean Dorber was speaking during the three-day annual conference of deans, in London this week. “There are financial stresses but these are not new,” he said. “I am optimistic, but there is panic in high places, and we need calm rational discussion rather than public hand-wringing.”

Read it all.

I am not, and probably never will be, a gardener. This does not mean that I don’t like gardens: I do, but mainly when they are somebody else’s responsibility. But one of the things I like about gardens is that they are great for playing hide and seek, which is what today’s gospel is all about.

In fact, the whole of St John’s gospel is a brilliantly constructed unfolding of the unseen God who is hidden revealingly in Jesus Christ: it’s an eternally significant game of hide and seek. And John’s literary method is also brilliantly captured, in art, by Graham Sutherland’s depiction of the hide and seek moment that is central to this Easter celebration.

Sutherland’s 2-dimensional garden is a jewel-like work that is filled with memories of the garden of Eden where we enjoyed but seriously damaged, our friendship with God, according to the book of Genesis. The prize it holds out to us is finding a way back into that garden of friendship for real, and not simply as a theoretical proposition.

If you have time after the Eucharist, go and find this icon of the resurrection. It’s at the far end of the south aisle. Go and pray; light a candle and rejoice in the opportunity to seek and find the image of the risen Christ. And here are five details that are hidden in the picture…

Read it all.

The #gardenofgethsemane by Carl Block, the acclaimed Danish artist. A moving and tender image whether you have a faith or none pic.twitter.com/T5g423VzqI

— Beech Genealogy (@GenealogyBeech) April 13, 2017

The National Mall is a seat of democracy, a site for protest, and the home of the Smithsonian Institution. These truths converged in 1968, when antipoverty demonstrators staged a six-week campaign on “America’s front yard.” The Smithsonian had a front seat to “Resurrection City, USA,” the protesters’ name for their encampment. Today, a salvaged mural from the often-forgotten event is back on the Mall, in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The slogans of solidarity inscribed on the mural inspired curators Aaron Bryant (NMAAHC) and Mireya Loza (NMAH) to reflect on the campaign’s multiethnic character, while Kendra Greendeer (NMAI) brings the legacy forward to recount how American Indians and allies traversed the same hallowed ground at a recent march across the Mall.

Check it all out.