Beauty comes from God. The most beautiful thing you have ever seen is beautiful because it reflects God. The most hideous thing you have ever seen is hideous because it distorts God’s nature. Part of our task in the Great Commission, connected to the Cultural Commission, is to create beauty.
Krzysztof Mizera creates art in a stained-glass window – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7768903 Daniel Borstein was director of the United States Library of Congress. He wrote a book about human creativity and the arts entitled The Creators which he begins with a question: Where did the impulse for
The laws of creation relate to what I call the “cultural trinity”— truth, goodness, and beauty. These elements of kingdom culture capture the comprehensive maximum of teaching nations to obey all that Jesus commanded. Just as humans are hardwired for life, they also thirst for truth, goodness, and beauty. These
Every Christmas, family tradition dictates that I travel up country to celebrate the festivities. One thing I love about long drives up country is the scenery along the way. My favorite stop is the Great Rift Valley. The landscape of the expansive rift extending thousands of kilometers in either direction
A human life is incomplete without the arts. If the “unexamined life is not worth living” as the ancient Greeks said, in the same way, a life without the experience and enjoyment of beauty is not a completely realized life. The Christian worldview takes into account the individual as a
How should Christians use the arts to proclaim the gospel? In the past, Europe enthroned reason. Seeing the terrible and devastating consequences, the West decided to adopt the even newer and more devastating attitude of irrationality. Can a Christian living in the midst of this post-Christian situation still proclaim the
Is art to lead us in the pursuit of truth, goodness and and the beautiful? The culture of the kingdom of God is marked by Truth, Beauty and Goodness, the cultural trinity. (We have written about this here.) The West was built upon the pursuit of this trinity, born out
How does the life of the Trinity and the image of the Great Dance help us understand the matter of form and freedom? Freedom without form is anarchy. Form without freedom is tyranny. Both of these options lead to enslavement. But form and freedom operating as perichoresis, the great dance,
Truth, beauty and goodness are the hallmarks of the culture of the kingdom of God. These are what I call the cultural trinity. Just as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are separate persons yet one God, so truth, beauty and goodness are not the same, but they cannot be
This is the second of a three-part series dedicated to my good friend Ana who works tirelessly to walk with women from North Africa who are sold into sexual slavery in Europe. We have already examined the illustration of the relatively fragile acanthus-leaf to see how the Greeks failed to
Listen to Darrow and Friends on the Ideas Have Consequences Podcast!
