Continuing today’s theme of the evolving nature of Evangelical Christianity in America:
Fujimura’s abstract works speak to his evangelical Christian faith. But to find it takes some digging.
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“The Bible is full of abstraction,” said Fujimura, an elder at a Greenwich Village church he helped start. “Think about this God who created the universe, the heavens and the earth from nothing. In order to have faith you have to reach out to something, to a mystery.”
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Evangelical unease with the visual arts dates to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Andy Crouch, editorial director for Christianity Today’s Christian Vision Project, which examines how evangelicals intersect with the broader culture, notes that Protestantism traces its origins to an era when noses were snapped off sculptures in a rejection of Catholic visual tradition while the word of God was elevated.
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“The very parched nature of evangelical visual culture is making people who have grown up in this culture thirsty for beauty,” he said.
Emphasis added. Read it all here in the Washington Post.
Here at the Episcopal Café we too recognize art as a path to God as regular visitors know by the regular rotation of art. But did you realize that our Art Blog tells more about the art used on these pages? One of our partners at EC is ECVA, the Episcopal Church and the Visual Arts.