Resources

“The Arts, Aesthetic Theory, and the Practice of Christian Worship”
Director: Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University

Christian worship has been an incubator for artistic expression for 2000 years. Worshiping communities all over the world have produced a dazzling array of works of music, architecture, sculpture, dance, drama, and fabric arts, all for the use of Christian community in its worship services. These works raise many questions: What is the role of art in liturgy? What about the role of the artist in the Christian community? What is "good" liturgical art? What about "artistic taste" in the Christian community? What can be done to nurture the most thoughtful, authentic artworks in Christian worship today? This seminar included studies of significant liturgical artworks, conversations with practicing artists, and readings in liturgical and aesthetic theory.

Participant Projects

• "Mourning Into Dancing": Spiritual Conversion At Silos  by James Blaettler
• Old Wine in New Wineskins: Responding to God and the Spiritual Internet by James F. Caccamo
• The Arts and Christian Worship: A Selected Bibliography for an Orientation to History, Theory and Practice by Lisa DeBoer
• They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Land: A Christian Landscape Aesthetic by Christopher Eads
• Beauty Glimpsed, or If You Get Everybody Making Art, Something Good Is Bound To Come Out Of It by Brian Fee
• Abstract of Project: "Reading the Homilies as Liturgical Act, Canonical Construct, and Homiletic Discourse" by Brian T. Hartley
• Evangelical Church Spaces And Design: The Role Of The Architect by Jack A. Kremers
• Abstract of "Choosing Music for Worship" by Charlotte Kroeker
• The Stole, an Ecclesiastical Vestment by Jeanne Logan
• Abstract of "Music and the Patterns of Christian Worship" by Mark S. McLeod-Harrison
• The Wedding by John Steven Paul
• Praise & Worship Songs by Bert Polman
• Thomas Kinkade’s Paradise Lost by Luke M. Reinsma
• Abstract of Seminar Project by Andrew Mark Sauerwein
• The Mathematics behind the Theology of John Polkinghorne, and Its Use in Christian Worship by Tom Scofield