released 5/21/2025

Adrienne Chaplin, co-author of Art and Soul: Signposts for Christians in the Arts (IVP Academic, 2001) explains why a Christian approach to art must involve various levels of inquiry and not be limited to discussions of worldview or meaning alone. She argues that an over-emphasis on worldview impoverishes the experience of encountering art as art. Addressing the history of the Church’s suspicion of the arts — particularly within the Protestant Evangelical church — Chaplin discusses the dualism that fosters it and the belief that art is decadent, frivolous, or irrelevant. She counters that art can be both otherworldly (an intimation of the transcendent) and grounded in embodied, this-world reality. Other themes discussed include the importance of a pre-reflective experience of art, the meaning of beauty and the recovery of aesthetics, and the role of art and artists in a community. 

46 minutes

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