However, since this photo gallery appears in the New York Times, will the primary audience see anything besides rednecks and hillbillies? Won’t this gallery simply reinforce existing stereotypes of Kentucky among the East Coast elites? Will they have any insight at all as to how to interpret this quote from Adams that accompanies the gallery?

When I was young, I couldn’t wait to leave Kentucky. Now, as I get older, I value every day when I return.

Many people know about Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, but I wish more people knew about Harlan Hubbard, classically trained painter and musician, an essayist who inspired Berry and who, like Berry, chose to live off the land in rural Kentucky rather than among the cultural elite. Hubbard is someone who gets you a bit closer to the paradoxical land that is Kentucky.

Since the atonement involves tremendous complexity and great mystery, the best narratives will not be simplistic (like movies were resolution comes through a car chase or gunfight). Neither will the best narratives be Manichean (where the good guys are all good and the bad guys are all bad). Nor will they be simply heroic (where protagonists triumph over obstacles through reliance on their own inner resources) or simply nihilistic (where the point is to enact the futility of human existence as in novels of Thomas Hardy like Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles). Rather, the best narratives will be morally complex, as in fact the enduring tragedies, comedies, and novels — like Oedipus Rex, King Lear, Paradise Lost, and Crime and Punishment — regularly are. Such morally complex narratives are most satisfying because, in terms of atonement theology, they are most true to life.

Mark Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, p. 71. Emphasis added.

The 5 Manliest 20th Century American Poets

“Poetry” and “manly” don’t often go together in contemporary imagination, but maybe that’s about to change, since manly men Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman have just teamed up to make a movie named after a poem.

Read the rest and find out my top 5.

Yesterday, my wife and I took our girls to see Up. The movie was excellent (as attested by its 98% fresh rating at RottenTomatoes.com), but what struck me was the number of themes picked up from the movies of  Hayao Miyazaki, the “Japanese Walt Disney.” Miyazaki is probably best known in the U.S. for Spirited Away. Other notable films of his include My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Princess Mononoke. Pete Doctor, the director of Up, has expressed his fondness for Miyazaki’s work.

In Up, I noticed the following themes picked up from Miyazaki’s movies:

• Airships (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky)
• Man’s relationship to Nature (Nausicaä, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke)
• Relationships between children and the elderly (Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle)
• Fantastic hidden worlds (Castle in the Sky, Nausicaä, Totoro, Spirited Away)

On top of this, Russell, the young star of Up, is Asian American (a rarity in American films, not to mention American animated films), which might also be a tip of the hat towards Miyazaki.

So, do you see the same things that I see?  Is Up a feature-length homage to Hayao Miyazaki?

Rather than being employed for its own sake, the poetry is always in the service of ideas and moral commitments, and it is always demanding that its readers measure themselves against the judgments it repeatedly makes – judgments about the nature of virtue, about the proper mode of civil and domestic behavior, about the true shape of heroism, about the self-parodying bluster of military action, about the criteria of aesthetic excellence, about the uses of leisure, about one’s duties to man and God, about the scope and limitations of reason, about the primacy of faith, about everything.

Apparently, the ghost of Shakespeare hangs over Milton studies constantly.  Another good quote, about the difference between Milton and Shakespeare, referring to the debates over who wrote Shakespeare’s plays:

Jonathan Rosen was getting at something like this when he said in a recent New Yorker piece, “No one would ever wonder whether Milton was really the author of his own work.”

Milton went blind in his mid-forties, prior to writing Paradise Lost: the magnificent epic that Milton is best known for was composed mentally and dictated to a series of secretaries, including one of his daughters and the poet Andrew Marvell, who wrote the poem “To His Coy Mistress,” a standard of English textbooks.

His blindness led him to compose one of the greatest poems in the English language, “On His Blindness,” which I memorized while I was unemployed following graduate school, wondering whether my long education would ever result in productive employment:

When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide, Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, least he returning chide, Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d, I fondly ask; But patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State Is Kingly.  Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and waite.

A quick explication: Milton despairs at going blind, feeling that his one “Talent” (his ability as a writer) is now wasted, and, referring to the parable of the talents, fears that Jesus will return and question him as to why he has not put his talent to work.  (The work “fondly” here means “foolishly” – Milton’s retort that he can’t work because he’s blind, in other words, is a pretty stupid thing to say to the Lord of Heaven and Earth.)  The poem turns as Milton comes to realize that God does not “need” his work or “his own gifts” (i.e. Milton’s talent was a gift from God to begin with).  Instead, what God demands is his readiness to serve.  The image changes to a royal court: thousands of courtiers speed to and fro in their service to God, but “They also serve who only stand and waite.” Milton’s readiness would soon be repaid; a few years after this poem, Milton began work on Paradise Lost.

I’m a nut about hymns and hymnals, but this is a great resource for any Christian whose looking for a particular hymn, or even just wanting to explore the great tradition of hymns. 

Link: The Calvin Hymnary Project

Piper, in considering how Jesus should be portrayed, says (note that this is Carter’s transcription of the sermon),

But I think they should probably be black portrayals of Jesus, and white portrayals of Jesus, and Chinese portrayals of Jesus. And everybody knows that they’re not accurate. There isn’t one that’s accurate. That’s why it’s legitimate to do lots of inaccurate works. Because you just say we all know that we don’t know what he looked like so what we want to say with our inaccurate Jesus is something true about Jesus. Namely, he’s there for everybody.

Carter objects, observing that we know that Jesus was a 1st century Semite, and therefore was definitely not black, Chinese, or white. Carter writes,

The fact that no particular rendition can be completely accurate does not make it “legitimate to do lots of inaccurate works.” Unless the work is intentionally abstract, then a degree of realism is to be expected from the artwork. By offering a portrayal that intentionally veers from the Biblical portrait of Christ, the artist is using Jesus to further a particular racial, ethnic, or political agenda.

I think Carter is putting art into too small of a box here. There are a lot of options between “intentionally abstract” and “realism.” An artistic depiction of Jesus is not like your snapshot of your grandma. If an artist takes the time to depict Jesus himself (as opposed to a Christ-figure), it’s hard to imagine that he or she doesn’t have an agenda. Now, we might disagree with the artist’s agenda – then again, we might wholeheartedly endorse it – but that’s a completely different matter. Artists are not Polaroid cameras: even “realistic” art is created for some purpose.

Depending on the context, any depiction of Jesus is going to carry with it connotations of one or more of the following:

• the two-thousand-year tradition of Christian art and iconography
• depictions of Jesus in 20th century art, likethose of Marc Chagall or Robert Mapplethorpe
• popular devotional pictures of Jesus (including black or Asian images)
• children’s story book versions of Jesus
• movie and television images of Jesus

I’m sure there are more that could be mentioned. Good artists will be aware of these connotations and use them for their own purpose. Good artists will also be aware of the potential reactions that their audience(s) will have to their portrayal of Jesus.

The specific historical context of Jesus’ life on earth, his teachings, and his crucifixicion and resurrection is extremely important and must be kept in mind constantly. A Christian artist (like any Christian) should be immersed in Scripture and be intimately familiar with Jesus’ teachings, the stories in Scripture, etc. But there are a tension between the truth of this specific historical context, the truth of the Incarnation (that God became one of us), and the truth of the Trinity (that Jesus existed eternally as God the Son before his birth to Mary).

A while back, one of our preachers asked us to imagine Jesus walking down the aisle of our church and sitting down next to us. It occurred to me that, if this happened, would I even recognize Jesus? Or would he have looked just like an “ordinary” person, indistinguishable in appearance from anyone else in our church? Jesus,

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross! (Phil 2:6-8)

Jesus has become such a stereotyped figure in our culture, that it’s easy to forget the scandals of the Incarnation and the Cross. Art, by its immediacy and emotional impact, can bring it home to us that, yes, Jesus became a human being, and, yes, he died on the cross so that we may live.

There are clear dangers in attempting to portray “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), especially if that portrayal is so well done or becomes so popular that it dominates the imaginations of worshippers. However, I believe that there are also ways to portray Jesus in art, regardless of the ethnicity of the portrayal, that are appropriate, faithful, and maybe even necessary. Carter seems to think that anti-semitism fuels non-Jewish depictions of Jesus. On the contrary, I think Christian depictions of Jesus (I’m not talking about portrayals of Jesus in voodoo art, Hindu temples, or other nonChristian contexts) are almost always motivated by a desire to make Jesus more real to the audience. It’s the same motivation behind good preaching – translating Biblical truth into a community’s specific context.

As always, the challenge is being faithful to Jesus. Merely being accurate in ensuring that a painting of Jesus has adequately Semitic features is no more faithful to Jesus, in my opinion, than wearing sandals can be said to be “following in Jesus’ footsteps.” Assuming that Carter records Piper’s words accurately (and I trust that he does), let me go on record as agreeing with Piper’s call to artists. There should be black, white, Asian, and yes, Jewish portrayals of Jesus in art – all faithful to the Biblical witness of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection.

May God use the work of Christian artists to teach and encourage us to follow Jesus, be conformed in his likeness, and live as new creations in Christ.

McCloud clearly and helpfully explains the fundamental visual and narrative techniques of comics, often with very clever “meta” illustrations. I would attempt to describe some of them, but that would be as interesting as, well, explaining a comic strip. I’m not LaGuardia, here. McCloud also examines the nature of comics, the combination of words and pictures in a narrative art form.

If you are like me, a thoughtful, mature, and good-looking adult who still sneaks over the graphic novel aisle at Borders, read this book. It will arm you with plenty of explanations when your significant other asks why you spent the grocery money on six different X-Men titles and a reprint of The Dark Knight Returns.

Scott McCloud’s official website