Morning Star Bring Lights Podcast recently interviewed Eric Taylor about how our Christian faith and the arts, beauty, and truth come together, and about how these are reflected in our fall conference. This interview explores a range of related topics including: how the arts reflect God, his creativity, and his beauty how the arts build community how the arts offer ways to deeply and meaningfully touch the lives of others how we as Christians might think more meaningfully and Biblically about the arts how brain research suggests art as something that changes and influences our values ..read more

Beholding Beauty:Worshiping God Through the Arts explores a range of arts and their intersection with Christian faith. Painting, sculpture, fashion, ballet, choreography, poetry, songwriting, popular music, novel, short story, theater, cinema, culinary art, winemaking, and fragrance are all set in the context not only of their importance to the church but in light of God as the original artist and art as worship. Each chapter ends with questions for reflection/discussion and with spiritual exercises. Many of these essays invite us to think more deeply about the arts. For example, “Drama is Re ..read more

Dear Pastor Friends: We've told you about the Vermont Conference on Christianity and the Arts. Here's why we think this so deeply matters and how you can get involved. Why It Matters Some ask whether the church doesn’t have more pressing concerns. Why invest in this? Creativity and beauty are good because they’re what God is like. After a flurry of creation and declaring it good, Genesis says God created us in his image. Creativity is central to that image. In the middle of the tabernacle instructions, we find a command to “add precious stones for beauty.” Not for theological significance ..read more

An impediment to creativity that I suspect is responsible for a considerable percentage of writer’s block is the self-imposed burden of originality. We search our minds and hearts, our lived experience, and the world around us for inspiration. We stare down the blank page, the glaring white screen and try to drum up something clever, elegant, novel, sublime. We think if we lock ourselves in a room long enough or force pen to paper, finger to keypad, it will happen: we will “come up with something.” And yet it is during these forced attempts at originality, I fear, when our words are most lik ..read more

After a series of losses in recent years – moving for two failing parents, letting go of a friend I loved, closed doors on jobs that excited me, a badly broken wrist, covid isolation, and more – grieving these accumulated losses seemed a fair explanation for the funk I was in. It was hard to get up in the morning. Writing became a struggle. Even reading became near-impossible. I know grieving matters, and lack of motivation and depression-like symptoms are normal in grief, so I took it in stride, but my lack of joy in things I loved was tough. At the turn of the year, I was back in Vermont for ..read more

PLUMB LINE   Plagues renamed virus have scrawled themselves script-like as a serpent across the history of the globe.  Countless afflictions go untold.  We have walls of stone in homeless woods, dividing hillsides, crumbling.  We have cock-eyed door frames, kitchens on a tilt once true to the testing angle.  The trees will bud, but we worry if they will bud, then fear they have budded too soon.  Work remains, and toil. Our lives speak only by their smallness:  offered kiss of a child; checkered will of a child; unsolicited gift of a lover’s smile.  Make ..read more

“The Spiritual Practice of Creativity” first appeared on Feb 14, 2022 on Kevin Fitton’s blog, The End of Platitudes. Thanks to Kevin for letting us share it here. That phrase—the spiritual practice of creativity—I don’t really know where it came from. One day, it just appeared in my mind. I was looking for a title for a workshop, and there it was. Immediately, though, I knew it was an important idea, despite the fact that I wasn’t quite sure what it was. Also, I knew it was true—that creativity could be a spiritual practice. It just sounded right.  Of course, creativity isn’t always spiri ..read more