Review: Transcendental Style in Film by Paul Schrader

Can a movie really capture what it feels like to have a spiritual encounter? Plenty of movies have certainly tried (Biblical epics and so forth), but have they ever really worked? One writer who's done some seminal work on this subject is film critic and filmmaker Paul Schrader. In the 1970s, Schrader wrote Transcendental Style in …

A Redemptive Theology of Art by David A. Covington

There are plenty of books that try to talk about Christian views of art, but too often those writers take the easy path, writing lists of "books or music you shouldn't read." Some authors are smart enough to realize the question goes deeper than that, and requires an exploration of what the Bible says about …

(Why Art Can’t be Strategized Pt 3)

Click Here to Read Part 2 Some weeks ago, I dealt with the idea that God can use a piece of art to suggest varying ideas to people, even ones the artist wouldn't expect people to get from the piece. I picked up this thought again a couple weeks later, noting that this doesn't mean …

The Need to Do Art Well (Why Art Can’t be Strategized Pt 2)

In Part 1 of this series, I suggested that artists can't ultimately control which spiritual themes people see in their work. This raises an interesting question: if making art is ultimately about leaving room for God to speak to peoples' hearts, then why do art well? Can't he use bad art as well as good …

The State of the Evangelical Mind

In the 1990s, Mark A. Noll wrote a book called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, pointing out how much anti-intellectualism there was in evangelical circles. In 2017, Christian leaders met for a conference to discuss whether that situation had changed, for better or worse. The State of the Evangelical Mind collects various essays from …