Featured Essay / Avant-Garde
Here's a one-hour video about theology and California, or, more specifically, Theology and California, the book of essays that Jason Sexton and I edited (Ashgate, 2014). You can view it at Open Biola (which includes several video and audio options), or stream the embedded version here below. Jason and I were…
Essay / Avant-Garde
C.S. Lewis once wrote a poem with the title Impenitence. What did he refuse to repent of? Man-like beasts. Anthropomorphic animals, especially the homey civilized ones from Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame. Here are the first two stanzas of his poem: All the world’s wiseacres
Essay / Avant-Garde
Phoebe Age Ten is an artist whose finest work occurs in her sketchbooks. It is in these small, impromptu productions between major artworks that she makes real progress as an artist, and indeed, makes real progress as an observer of the natural forms that animate
Essay / Art
What good is a statue nobody can see? In a courtyard in Cambridge, England (just beside the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences) is a pair of iron footprints. Over the last few summers, I’ve seen these footprints dozens of times. I’ve wondered what they were
Essay / Art
Probably just because I’m spending the summertime in England, I’ve been listening to Van Morrison’s song by that name lately. This is not the song I’d send somebody to if they wanted to understand what some people find so fascinating about Van Morrison; there are
Essay / Avant-Garde
Draco Haiku, by Freddy back when he was Freddy Age Ten: Cute Bearded dragon Or Pogona Various The best lizard pet This simple haiku floats on the page beside a drawing of its subject, Draco the bearded dragon. The drawing features a few long, powerful
Essay / Art
Imagine being an artist commissioned to illustrate the entire Bible. From the epic stories to the pithy proverbs, from psalms of praise to prophets of doom, from the life of Jesus to his parables, you were supposed to produce pictures for everything. Now imagine that
Essay / Avant-Garde
The representational skills of the artist known as Phoebe Age Nine have undergone considerable development in recent years. Her early work was already masterful, but in earlier compositions, she tended to concentrate on a few simple shapes. The power of early works like 18 Cats
Essay / Avant-Garde
Phoebe Age Nine imagines Sauron, the Lidless and Unblinking Eye of Mordor, in his great lust for the One Ring. Here he is supported by worker Orcs: Cowering at the bottom, barely visible, is Gollum, pitifully protesting, “it is my prechus golem golem.” We can’t
Essay / Art
Now that there’s a blockbuster movie based on Tintin, the characters and situations from the classic comics will become even more famous. I don’t care very much about the movie; I only hope it (with any sequels) proves good enough to serve as an advertisement
Essay / Avant-Garde
Freddy Age Six provides an illustration for George MacDonald’s Phantastes, the truly bizarre Faerie Romance of 1858. The main character, improbably named Anodos, leaps smiling from his bed to find the floor of his room divided by a creek, complete with fish swimming in it.
Essay / Avant-Garde
This is your planet. Not the one with the rocky islands floating on a sloshy sea, but the nice, solid, red one. Kltpzyzxm, you listen to me! Sit up at your learning stump and read aloud from your info-slab. How do you expect to make
Essay / Art
Does it make sense to thank someone for something they may have disowned? A lot has happened since Frank Schaeffer published Addicted to Mediocrity thirty years ago. He was going by the more diminutive “Franky” then, signifying, maybe, how staunchly he stood in his dad’s