Art

A few weeks ago I learned the distressing news that a couple I know is divorcing; the husband has pursued pornography, and beyond, for a decade. His sin has not only ravaged his wife's life, but in violating that covenant he orphaned four young children from a faithful fatherhood. He stands as part...

Recently, I had occasion to fly to Korea via San Francisco. Flying across the US on a clear day is one of those rare pleasures which really allows you to get the geographical measure of the place: how flat much of the country is; how the snow-capped Rockies push the land upwards towards the sky in...

Nearly a decade ago now, Lisa and I went to visit an art exhibit at a private gallery on Manhattan. I had recently become acquainted with the Japanese-American artist Makoto Fujimura, and I wanted to see his work for myself. The exhibition was called "Images of Grace," and we were dazzled to...

I have quite a collection of books on the arts from a Christian perspective, but I was so eager for Dr. Ryken's new book, that I have had it on backorder since last December. The subtitle of the book is A Call to Recover the Arts. In some ways it is frustrating that a book like this is necessary...

He taught me how to see. Quite literally. Once our dear friend Hans Rookmaaker was visiting us in Connecticut, and as we drove around in our car he would tell us to pause in front of a certain building. "This one is the real thing," he would declare. What he meant was that the particular home...

At the risk of being labeled a musical snob, I venture a comment or two on one of the twentieth century's greatest composers, the centenary of whose birth we celebrate this year--Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975). He is to music what Alexander Solzhenitsyn is to Soviet literature. Finding early...

Carrying biblical overtones and set in the rural Iowa town of Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's second novel is the winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction--and with good reason. In a spare prose that rings with psychological realism and moral depth, Marilynne Robinson depicts what William...