Sublime

What makes the pastoral (or better, the ministerial) remain significant, even up against these transitions, is its ability to host an encounter with personhood. It appears, both in lived experience and the tradition, that divine action comes in and through personhood.

of their artists’ work.

The church may need an infusion of creativity. But we’ve failed to see that the kind of creativity embedded in the drive for singularity idolizes the self.

Another successful defense of society against the culture within itself is to give artists a place by regarding them as the producers of property, thus elevating the value of consuming art, or owning it. It is notable that very large collections of art, and all the world’s major museums, are the work of the very rich or of societies during strongly

New York Studio School on 8th Street in Manhattan.

Enchantment is kept from reappearing because our day-to-day order is detached from the divine. The institutions and structures we live in, whether private or public, make no presumptions that they reflect God’s act—the chain of being has been broken.

This form of creativity returns to the church, now from the bay of late modernity, completely secularized. This creativity has no need for a living God. It is a creativity that is severed from the beauty of God—which is what makes it so advantageous for making money and winning market share.

the buffered self seems predisposed to lock divine action out of its inner world, radically reversing Augustine’s vision and making things very difficult for the pastor. If God is to enter this space that Augustine helped make, then God must be stripped of otherness and made into a therapeutic crutch that the brave can outgrow.

So much of what we see in galleries is responding to the imperative to overproduce, overenlarge, overconsume, and for artists with ascending and funded careers this trajectory can seem all but unavoidable. As Roberta Smith points out, the primary meaning of these works is often: “I made this because I can.”