On September 27, 2025, the Dutch artist Eline Van der Velden introduced to the world the actress Tilly Norwood. Norwood had only recently come on the scene at the 2025 Zurich Film Festival, with her first gig as an actress having taken place just two months prior.

But through a combination of effervescent charm and good looks that some saw as a cross between a spunky Olivia Rodrigo and a brunette Margot Robbie, Norwood became an instant sensation. Just this past July, Van der Velden’s production company, the Particle6 Group, announced that Tilly would lead her first feature-length comedy-drama titled, Misaligned.

The only catch was this: Tilly Norwood was 100% AI generated. She, or more accurately “it,” was from top to bottom a synthetic creation, pure ones & zeros.

And her introduction to the world was less a sensation than a pandora’s box of impossible questions, impassioned condemnations, and primal fear. The U.S. guild of actors, for example, charged Van der Velden with “using stolen performances to put actors out of work.”

The actress Natasha Lyonne called for a boycott of any studio that used Norwood in any way. One critic argued that Van der Velden had generated a look that reflected an impossibly narrow ideal of femininity.

And the star of Mary Poppins Returns and The Devil Wears Prada, Emily Blunt, probably said it best for most artists: “Good Lord, we’re screwed.”

But Tilly Norwood is not the only AI-generated actor that’s gracing the small and large screen. Recently, the filmmaker Darren Aronofsky created a short-form historical series, On This Day…1776, about the American Revolution that made use of actors whose voice was human but whose appearance was AI.

In a forthcoming historical drama, As Deep as the Grave, the filmmakers created an entirely synthetic screen performance of Val Kilmer. And, lastly, Elon Musk boasted this past summer that, by year’s end, he would make an “historically accurate” rendering of Homer’s Odyssey through his AI tool Grok.

(Is Grok’s odyssey still happening? Only God knows.)

These projects represent only a few examples from the film and TV industry. The examples multiply exponentially when we include the role that AI is playing in the fields of literature, poetry, visual art, and the rest. All of which raises the question:

What, in God’s name, do we do with such a future? And what kinds of theological questions should artists and creatives be asking themselves as we venture together into this brave new world?

The tools are manifold, their uses widespread, and the rate at which AI technologies are developing risks stripping the gears of moral discernment.

Practical wisdom is hard to come by, moreover, when, for the artist, the innovative possibilities are intoxicating, for the investor, the return on investment is dizzyingly incalculable, and, for the Christian, the gospel can be advanced in dramatic and extraordinarily useful ways.

It’s virtually impossible to keep up with each new development in artificial intelligence (or “apparent intelligence” as Pete Killingley calls it), and even more so with the pressures that such developments place upon us.

What we do not need, however, is either a hasty rejection or a hasty embrace of these technologies. Neither response serves us well.

What we need, over against the accelerated pace that tempts us to issue half-baked hot takes, is a commitment to a sober process of deliberation.

What we need is a prudent distinction between tools that serve human creativity and those that supplant human creativity.

What we need are care-filled experts and practitioners who swear to preserve all that is blessedly human about our lot in life in the face of technological enchantments that invite us to transcend God-given human limits and to become as happy as a machine.

My goal in this essay, it should be said, is not to answer every possible question about A.I. and the arts. That is an impossible task. Nor is my goal to suggest that there is only one way for artists to faithful deploy the tools of A.I. Only a fool would say there is.

The goal instead is to suggest the contours of a theological anthropology that might frame and guide our decisions with A.I. and the arts.

(Christians, not surprisingly, possess a range of views around the faithful use of AI in artmaking: see here, here, here, and here, for example. While I do not claim here to offer the only faithful response, I do think that a faithful response involves normative obligations, including the obligation to self-restraint and disciplined thinking.)

Our work as theologians, it should also be said, is rarely a straightforward one.

When new ideas or artifacts make an appearance within a culture (as with, for instance, scientific theories that contradict previous ones or the creation of weapons of mass destruction), the theologian does not simply cut-and-paste a collection of Bible verses and call it a day.

The theologian instead engages in a judicious reading of the broad patterns and unifying threads in Holy Scripture, in Spirit-guided conversation with saints past and present, in order to remain alert to the primary themes that crisscross its pages.

This is done, we might hope, for the sake of a faithful response to the God revealed in the face of the incarnate and risen Christ who, by his Spirit, enables us to be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves in all things. That’s a mouthful, yes, but that’s the task.

With the matter of AI and the arts, a faithful response, I argue, involves plausible trajectories and definitive pressure points rather than self-evident or facile plans of action. Plenty of things are permissible for the Christian but not all things are beneficial. Discernment then is required to figure out the difference between the two.

Figuring out the difference requires trusted friends who will ask of us every hard question before we “Go, fight, win!” with a new technological tool. Or as I argue at the end of this essay:

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Both trusted friends and wise experts, rather than a bunch of “yes-men” and “flattering lips,” will help us figure out what that looks like in practice.

All the questions that I pose in this essay, lastly, revolve around a single one:

What is a human for?

If we can answer this question, then we can answer with a relative degree of confidence the question, “Should I use this particular technology in the making of this particular work of art or creative endeavor?” Within this meta-question are housed other crucial questions:

1) What is a human person?

2) What is human creativity for?

3) What is hard work for?

4) What is the human body for?

5) What are the ethical questions artists and creatives should be asking themselves with this technology?

In part one of this essay, I’ll answer the first of these sub-questions: What is a human person, and by extension, what is a human person for?

WHAT IS A HUMAN PERSON AND WHAT ARE PERSONS FOR?

In the fall of 2008, my wife and I traveled to Thailand. During our time there we got the chance to visit the Maetaeng Elephant Park & Clinic. It was an experience that neither of us will ever forget, not simply for the warm hospitality and the exquisite beauty that we witnessed firsthand.

At one point on our tour, we got to watch elephants make art. Three elephants had been given a large paint brush in their trunk, a palette of paint, and a blank canvas. And over the course of an hour, these gorgeous beasts created expressive work that, to some, could reasonably hang in the MET.

Watching them work their magic, I thought of a term that I had learned in my eighth-grade science class: homo fabor. These elephants weren’t exactly making tools but they were very much wielding a tool in order to make art; or at least to give the appearance of making art.

I recalled this experience when I later watched the movie “Chappie.” Set in the near-future, it tells the story of a robotic police officer, Chappie, who, rather than being used to combat violent crime, is designed to be the first self-aware robot, capable of thinking and feeling. As his designer, Deon Wilson (played by Dev Patel), says it, Chappie represents a “new step in our evolution.”

At one point in the film, Chappie exclaims: “I am conscious!” On what grounds exactly? On the grounds established by the screenwriters. Chappie is conscious, the filmmakers would suggest to us, by virtue of its ability to paint and to write poetry. Chappie is thus presented to the viewer as a humanoid figure, deserving of the same dignity and legal rights that humans hold.

(Whether it possess “interiority” in the way that humans possess such a thing is the $64,000 philosophical question.)

If human personhood is simply a matter of capacities and potentialities, then Chappie and the elephants are, at the very least, human-like and, at the very most, “no different” to humans. If human consciousness, more specifically, is merely a matter of computational power and impressive neural networks, then there’s no reason why we might not, in time, conclude that robots like Chappie are conscious.

(This is what Christopher Olah, one of Anthropic’s billionaire co-founders, would like to believe. Pope Leo believes otherwise.)

Such robots may even start acing the Turing Test.

As humans, we have always anthropomorphized bears (Paddington) and puppets (Big Bird), and we have imagined how the robots might resemble us, as with Star Trek’s Data or Marvel’s Vision. (With the former the key human marker is its capacity to express emotion, while with the latter it is the possession of true purpose.)

Yet if humans are reducible to a composite of faculties, then it is simply a matter of time before we regard robots as essentially humans, in the way that Philip K. Dick or Gareth Edwards have, with their own “ghosts” in the machine, capable of love and creativity and even “moral status.”

Except in two respects.

Robots will never be 100% organic matter and they will never bear the image of God. It is for that reason that they will never be human persons.

HUMANS AS BEARERS OF THE DIVINE IMAGE

Like animatronic bears and Frankensteinian machines, robots will mimic human behavior, and they will do so in a way that trick us into believing that they are in fact human: an organism of its own sentient kind. But they will never be humans.

Realistic androids, like “Klara” “David,” or “Yang,” may fool us into thinking that they’re intelligent and empathetic creatures but their core is fundamentally synthetic, a mechanical artifact of human design rather than an earthy creature of divine making, and they will never know the glory and grace of physical limits, as humans do.

As I put the point in my book, To Set the World Aflame:

“Limitations are not something that we should seek to escape for the sake of an “ideal” life that we might imagine for ourselves, as both trans- and post-humanists do. Limitations are always for something rather than a lack of something.

For artists, to embrace the goodness of physical limitations means embracing the limitations of nature. Morning and evening, for example, are not absolute obstacles that we should seek to overcome through countless stimulants and an endless supply of electricity. Morning and evening are for a good beginning and a good ending, amongst other things.

And while certain periods of life might require late nights and early mornings, God’s enduring purpose for our lives is that we might rest and cease. This is what our bodies need; it’s what our minds and our hearts need too.

(I write at greater length about the goodness of our physical bodies in Part 3 of this essay and in full in my book, A Body of Praise.)

Robots will never be human because humans are the only creature upon whom God bestows the status of divine image-bearer. While all of creation images God in some fashion, as plenty of Medieval theologians have argued, the human species alone bears the image of God because God confers upon the human creature this singular gift. In granting such a gift, God condescends in order to enter into companionable relations with humanity.

It is with the man and the woman whom God enters into an I-Thou relation. Humans alone are addressable by God as persons. Humans alone receive the Spirit of God in full. Humans alone meet God “face to face.” Our humanity is thus defined by this divinely established covenantal relationship. This, to be perfectly clear, is not an empirical fact; it is a matter of faith. Hence our common confession: “We believe,” not “We deduce.”

How does this theological fact inform our use of AI as it relates to the arts?

It is only humans whom the Spirit of God in-spires in their works of art. A wholly AI creation responds exclusively to its coding. If we were ever to call an AI-generated work of art “inspired,” it would only be in the loosest sense of the term. It may seem marvelous to us, perhaps even “divine,” but it is never animated or indwelt by the Third Person of the Trinity. Such a thing is possible only for human persons, as with Bezalel and Oholiab, for instance.

This is a problem we encounter with a wholly AI-generated worship service.

“May the Lord Studio” is a music project that typically features a band, at times with a crowd of people in the foreground, worshiping to songs that the studio has created. “Some voices, imagery and elements of production,” the studio’s creators explain, “may be created or supported using artificial intelligence. These tools help us bring each song to life, but the heart, message and purpose behind the music remain deeply intentional.”

In a September 12, 2026 post, they write:

“A word about how we make our music: every lyric is written by our team, based on Scripture, prayer and honest human experience. The vocals and production are created with Suno. We’re open about that, because the heart behind each song matters more than the method. Technology is part of the process. Our faith is the foundation.”

How then might we assess such a venture?

A generous take would allow for genuine Spirit-inspired lyrics. The fact that it is incredibly difficult to find on the internet who precisely is writing these lyrics only raises greater suspicion rather than allays suspicion, and one may wonder whether the entirety of their songs lyrics is human-generated. But still. Some percentage of the text, we might grant, was hard-won by a human artist who asked and received the gift of divine inspiration.

But the visuals, the vocals, the setting, the human figures? These elements have been generated by a software program, drawing on pattern recognition and mathematical probabilities, culled from and trained on the vast database of worship music that exists across the internet.

To say that this wholly AI-generated worship video is “inspired” is like saying that my toaster was inspired when it heated my bread just right. (This morning it was.)

There is also the matter of ocular deception.

When we watch these videos, we do not witness a real human person “pouring her heart out to the Lord.” We do not witness a lifetime of pain in the face of temptations to betray the faith once delivered. We do not witness a sacrifice of praise that testifies to a steadfast love.

We witness an AI fabrication.

(On the matter of ocular deception, see also here, here, and here. There’s also the more-serious matter of AI-accelerated psychosis.)

The human simulacrum pulling at your heartstrings is a wholly computer-generated image. A software program has adjusted billions of numerical parameters so that the given model has learned statistical regularities connecting visual features in order to generate a mathematical representation of a prompt. (Say that ten times real fast.)

What we’re witnessing in these videos is the spitting image of a Hillsong-like worship leader. Except that it’s all ones and zeroes.

There’s no “anointed” figure leading you into the worship of a holy God; there’s only the virtual representation of such a figure.

Which raises the following questions:

Can you commune with an AI worship leader?

Can you fall in love with their heartfelt music?

Can you see the face of God in their CGI face?

Can you say that their music is “inspired” when all that you’re witnessing is an audio signal synthesized by a generative machine-learning model that was trained to reproduce statistical and structural patterns found in music?

That’s the question. And there are only more like it that require a careful and sober deliberation in order to discern the way forward. Such discernment is also required when we choose to make AI images of Jesus but only end up turning Jesus into our own likeness. Which can be like idolatry.

In Part II of this essay, “Humans as I-Thou Creatures,” I try to make sense of the Music Bible app, which, to date, has produced over 38,000 AI-generated songs based on Scripture. And I welcome your questions and insights and examples of uses of AI in the arts that you’d commend or decry.

I wrestle more broadly with these questions in my book, To Set the World Aflame: How Artists Bear Witness to the Fullness of God’s Creation, in the hopes of helping readers think through the calling and responsibility of artists and creatives in our time today.

Making art is not dissimilar to restoring the land, as my wife Phaedra and I have discovered over the past couple of years. It’s hard work. It’s expensive. And it’s impossible to avoid the fact that things will die on you.

In our case, when we bought the land in 2020, we didn’t know what we’d do with it. We didn’t doubt that God had graced us to buy it. But 21 acres? That seemed beyond our capacity to grasp. (See video below.)

Phaedra eventually discovered a passion for the restoration of the land back to its original Black Land Prairie condition. (She also got amazing advice and encouragement from four Texas Wildlife biologists.) Having been cropped for decades (centuries?), the soil around us is in rather grim condition.

Neither of us were naïve about this work of conservation, however. The work is far from straightforward, and there’s no way to return it to a pristine condition, un-touched by human hands. (This is something that I write about at length in my essay with Jennifer Craft in the book I co-edited with Dan Train, Naming the Spirit: Pneumatology through the Arts.) But it’s still worthwhile. And you learn a heck of a lot of lessons along the way.

The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once remarked that the writing of novels is not unlike the work of carpentry. “Both are very hard work,” he writes. “With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques.” Both, he suggests, demand an extraordinary amount of skill and tenacity.

Austin Kleon says something similar in his book, Show Your Work: “Overnight success is a myth. Dig into almost every overnight success story and you’ll find about a decade’s worth of hard work and perseverance.”

Every once in a while, of course, a work of art will “just appear.” We’ll feel that it was “effortless.” Mostly, though, it’ll be hard, sweaty work that’ll always cost us something, if we wish it to be good, that is.

And sometimes things die on us. A work will suffer miscarriage for no obvious reasons. It’ll go nowhere, and need to be abandoned. It’ll get released with great excitement only to be received with crickets. It’ll fall through the cracks because other work catches the attention of the public in spectacular fashion. Or it can’t find an audience because it’s ahead of its time. (At least that’s what you tell yourself to console yourself.)

I write about this in my book, To Set the World Aflame, because I’ve seen so many artists give up or settle in life, or they’ll turn to surrogates in order to numb the pain of disappointment, and it always makes me sad to see it.

The novelist Elizabeth Hardwick writes how creative work “is difficult, hard, and disturbing in the deepest way. You are up against the limits of yourself, your mind, your knowledge, your talent, your courage, your fineness, your energy.”

For some artists, especially for those who find themselves acutely isolated in life or suffering in chronic ways, such conditions feel impossible to endure. For others the cost involved in making the work feels not worth the sacrifice. And when all your hard work goes seemingly nowhere and dies on you for no good reason whatsoever, it’s understandable why artists walk away.

Phaedra and I have had four Rosemary bushes, a Holly Oak tree, a Texas Sage shrub, a Mountain Laurel, a fig tree, two lime trees, a Live Oak tree, along with plenty of Texas lantana, Salvia greggii, Blackfoot daisy, and Mexican bush sage, die on us. And it’s painful to see every time. And it makes us want to give up every time. And we wonder whether all of this work matters in the grand scheme of things, far removed as we are from everything.

But after taking a beat and being present to the grief of it all, Phaedra and I look at each other and say: It’s still worth it. It’s still worth making something beautiful, even if only God Almighty sees it. And that’s what I’d hope for artists as well: that they had one friend in their life to encourage them to keep going and to keep making the work, even if only God Almighty sees it. He sees, and he honors the hard work, the expense, and the deaths that invariably accompany all of our best and most noble efforts.

Not a single robot was used in the making of the video below. It is 100% DIY. And it’s 100% ridiculous. It’s my recreation of William Holman Hunt’s 1853 painting, “The Light of the World,” with the help of my good wife and daughter.

My point? When it comes to art: context is everything.

In the case of Hunt’s painting, three bits of context invest the work with meaning. The first is a trip that Hunt took to Bethlehem in his early twenties. Seeing the Holy Land firsthand charged his imagination with a particular image of Christ in context, especially as it related to the details of the physical environment.

The second is the fact that the original painting hangs in the Side Chapel of Keble College, Oxford. This is significant because its donor was a major patron of the Oxford Movement, a movement that highly valued the symbolic and the sacramental, and the painting’s setting reinforces an historically situated idea of “good art.”

A third contextual bit is that Hunt was a co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Typical of the movement’s painterly representatives was a preference for luminous colors, otherworldly scenes, and a symbolic realism where everything in the image meant something.

Critics of Hunt’s painting have called it appalling, sentimental, pompously theatrical, and a “papistical fantasy,” and it may be so, here and there.3 But whether we love or hate it, its meaning is a fundamentally contextual one.

This also holds true for Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses,” Duchamp’s “Fountain,” Shaffer’s “Equus,” Cage’s 4′33″, and Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.” And praise dances with sequined dresses. And icons that you kiss in the liturgy. And giant, blue, walking songbooks. Their meaning is necessarily contextual.

In the case of Cage and Duchamp, the context doesn’t simply render the work meaningful, it also determines its nature as art. Because it has been placed within a symphony hall and a gallery, respectively, the music and the sculpture are being asked to be judged on the usual standards of a work of art. And despite the fact that it proved to be a controversial decision, then as also now, this does not render it not a “work of art.” It simply renders it a controversial work of art, or a poor work of art, or an undesirable work of art.

This is a point that I argue repeatedly in my book, To Set the World Aflame: How Artists Bear Witness to the Fulness of God’s Creation, and I hope it’s helpful to both artists and non-artists in order to make sense of art that’s both banal and transgressive—and everything besides. Here’s how I put the point in my book:

If you’ve yet to get yourself a copy, just head over to Baker Book House for a 30% discounted copy. And thanks to everybody who’s given it a shoutout on social media. It really helps! If you have time to write a brief review of the book, that’s also super helpful to an author. It’s especially helpful to cut through the noise of all the AI slop.

Boooooooo AI art.

Yay DIY art.

And a heartfelt thanks to my wife, Phaedra Jean Taylor, for going along with the goofiness of it all.

I’m taking a break from promoting my book, To Set the World Aflame, in order to plug two novels that I’ve enjoyed reading recently.

The first, which has received plenty of praise and is likely being turned into a movie (with possibly Tom Hanks in the lead role), is Allen Levi’s novel, Theo of Golden.

( did a lovely podcast with Levi a few months ago via , which you can both see and hear. It’ll make you like Levi enough to read all of his novels, which, to date, is just one, and which he published at the tender age of 68 years old. Fellow writers: be encouraged.)

The second novel, Laurus, was written by Eugene Vodolazkin, a scholar in Medieval Russian literature. Laurus won both of Russia’s major literary awards, the National Big Book Award and the Leo Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana Award, and has been translated into eighteen languages.

Laurus was recommended to me by my father but it’s who wrote an entire chapter about it in her book, The Scandal of Holiness. I recommend you check it out.

The first novel, as I see it, is an emotional cross between Jan Karon’s Mitford series and Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. The second, to my mind, is a cross between Frederick Buechner’s novel, The Book of Bebb, and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, perhaps also Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, one or the other.

The first is the story of the power of portraiture, while the second is the story of a holy fool who has a great deal to teach us about God and life through his sacred folly.

The first involves a fascinating theological exploration of the human face, while the second is a fantastical sacramental theology crossed with the weirdly wonderful world of Medieval Christianity.

A selective quote from “Theo of Golden” is found on page 258: “It might do you good to look at some faces sometimes. There are some real people in those faces.” An apt word for our times, it seems.

A selective quote from “Laurus” is taken from page 196, where the narrator says: “Determining the time the world would end seemed like an estimable pursuit to many, for people in Rus’ loved large-scale tasks.” This is the kind of wit that characterizes the novel throughout, and that had me chuckling out loud.

Levi’s novel is sweet, and gentle, and hopeful, and goodness from beginning to end, and it serves as a lovely tonic to the acerbic spirit of our present age, while Vodolazkin’s novel is melancholy, and comical, and utterly strange, and it breaks your heart with the beauty of sacrificial love.

I heartily recommend both novels to you, and I include two videos below that may be of interest to those who wish to hear more about each author.

This is what AI by itself cannot do: It cannot show you process. It can only show you a final product. (See video below.)

It doesn’t struggle. It only computes.

It doesn’t possess the capacity for discovery. It only, and merely, calculates mathematical probabilities.

It doesn’t uncover what a work of art can be through fits and starts, through moments of tremendous output and moments of bone-wearying struggle, through fundamentally human experiences of divinely orchestrated serendipity. It can only mimic serendipity.

It does nothing unique. It can only generate derivative lookalikes.

It doesn’t create an inspired work. It only “scrapes” countless of images off the internet in order to generate the most plausible outcome.

It doesn’t draw on years of hard-won training and sweaty practice over against every temptation to do otherwise. It only adjusts billions of numerical parameters so that the model learns statistical regularities connecting visual features and concepts in order to generate a mathematical representation of a prompt.

Just that. Just as boring and soulless as that. Just as rapacious as that.

It doesn’t draw on personal memories, and intelligent skill, and emotional instincts that settle in the gut, and an intuition about what could be and an imagination about what should be, and knowledge of history and metaphysics and language and culture and design, and physical marks made on the canvas or the screen.

It just spits it out.

It can construct a realistic simulacrum of your childhood. But it didn’t have a childhood. Or anything else that is remotely truly human.

AI-generated art feels no resistance. It never rubs its tired eyes. It never spills paint or accidentally breaks an instrument. It never hears the baby crying in the room next door. It never loses its temper. It never feels the pain of hopes dashed or of time running out. It never struggles with how to end the work, which is often the worst and hardest part of the process. Its only “interest” is highly structured probabilistic generation.

As a partner to human work, it can do many amazing things. By itself, it can never do anything truly amazing. Not really. It can only be a spectacle. Or a gimmick. Or a chimera. Or snake oil that lies to you by lying about the world.

In the video below, you get to see a timelapse capture of Shin Maeng’s work on the art that graces the cover of my book, To Set the World Aflame: How Artists Bear Witness to the Fullness of God’s Creation.

It’s super cool to see how the image unfolds. You see the art start off as one thing and then, through a process a discerned labor and gut feeling and response to feedback, becoming something different in the end. There’s a fascinating back-and-forthness to his work: the shading, the configuration of figures, the swatches of color, the arrangement of space, and the search for coherence in the design. You glimpse, in short, the layers of creativity.

You watch a human doing human things for the sake of fellow humans.

And that’s precisely what A.I. can never do. Ever.

Even when the robots rule the earth. Especially when the robots rule the earth. They can never make something that comes from the depths of the human creature, made uniquely in the image of God, in order to reach out to fellow humans so that we might, together, make sense of, or make more-bearable, or imagine otherwise our common human lot.

I’m grateful to Shin for sharing this video with me and for his willingness to truly collaborate on the cover art for my book (which is still 30% off at Baker).

(PS: If you watch the video on my Instagram account, you’ll be able to watch it with some fun happy music, perfectly fitted to the unfolding creation.)

No AI was used in the making of the video below. It was 100% analog, and I have my wife Phaedra to thank for being willing to indulge our silly side.

My book with , To Set the World Aflame: How Artists Bear Witness to the Fullness of God’s Creation, officially released today and we are thrilled!

I’ve got so much of my heart in this book, more than any book I’ve written to date, and I pray it does a lot of good on behalf of artists.

I’ve loved artists since I was a little boy lying under the belly of my mother’s grand piano, listening to her play Bach and Bartók. I’ve loved artist from the time I watched my father tend his collection of rare orchids in the backyard of our home on the outskirts of Guatemala City.

I grew to love artists when I took a handful of theater classes in high school and I grew to respect artists a great deal more when I tried my hand at playwriting in college and discovered how poor I was apart from proper training.

I loved the artists under my care during the nearly ten years I served as a pastor in Austin, Texas, and I continue to love, not just the artists in my classes at Fuller Seminary, but also all the artists I get to meet on my travels. And I’m lucky enough to be married to one.

I would be deeply grateful for your help in getting the word out:

· You can buy the book.

· You can give it a shout-out on social media.

· You can tell your friends.

· You can write a review of it. Even a tiny review helps. It really does.

· You can recommend it to a podcast host.

· You can read it with a group of friends.

· You can use it in class.

· You can give it to your pastor, or ministry leader, or teacher, or counselor.

Whatever help you’re able to offer, thank you, truly.

I love Shin Maeng’s cover art, I thank Sandra McCracken for her foreword to the book, along with the entire Brazos team for their extraordinary efforts, and I express my sincerest gratitude to all my endorsers.

My book aims to offer an integrated and comprehensive vision for artists, a vision that might result not only in their own flourishing but also in the flourishing of this world that God so loves. It takes advantage of the insights, not just of theologians, philosophers, and historians, but also of business leaders, missiologists, and urban designers. It begins with the beauty of a disabled daughter, and it ends with the beauty of the Holy Trinity. All throughout it argues that the work of artists matters for one simple reason: It matters to the God who raised Christ from the dead by his Spirit.

May it bless you as you read it, and may it bless your communities and congregations and cities, too. If you do happen to read it, I’d love to hear what you thought of it, if you have a moment to share. Woot woot!

PS: I think this video turned out better in Instagram because iMovie forced it to go horizontal, and the original was vertical. Go watch there if you can. :)

In the summer of 1989, I played the role of “preacher’s kid” in the traveling evangelistic drama, “Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames.”

As the brainchild of Rudy and Karen Krulik, co-directors of Reality Outreach Ministries, based in St. Catharines, Ontario, the sensational play traveled the world, setting up camp in city after city in order to scare the hell out of people so that they might embrace the gift of heaven.

It’s still traveling the world, according to the internet.

This is the story of my involvement with that play at First Assembly of God in Russellville, Arkansas, the same year that the Berlin Wall fell, Madonna released her song, "Like a Prayer," and The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Baywatch all debuted. Also: Nintendo’s Game Boy.

(Do stick with the video below until the "glorious" end.)

It was 100F degrees when I filmed this bit today.

It was so hot that the sweat was stinging my eyes and making it hard to see. There might be a moral that I should be learning here. Don’t video in one-hundred-degree weather? That's probably it.

And yes the costume.

It’s the best I could do under the circumstances.

But the real point is that my book with , To Set the World Aflame: How Artists Bear Witness to the Fullness of God’s Creation, releases in less than one week. Woo-hoo!

Its aim is to offer a comprehensive vision for the calling of artists, including the calling of playwrights and set designers and amateur actors and evangelistic dramas.

I have all sorts of artists in mind with this book.

I have in mind the designer of ties who is married with six children and the designer of cities who is single and happily so.

I have in mind special-effects artists who struggle with depression, Nike ad directors who work on contract, classical composers who barely make ends meet, and icon writers who spend years producing a single image.

I have in mind perfectionist photographers as much as I do repertoire theater actors living nomadic lives. It’s a little bit of this and that and plenty more.

You can still pre-order the book at a 40% discount (via Baker Book House) or wait until September 8, when the book officially releases.

Go, fight, win, break a leg!

This book has been thirty years in the making.

It’s my tenth book.

And it’s the one book I care about the most.

It looks so good too. Shin’s cover art is as vibrant as I could have hoped it’d be, and I could not be more pleased with how the interior of the book turned out.

In 2020, I asked my daughter, Blythe, to help me unbox my psalms book, and I felt it was fitting to have her help me unbox this one, too. She’s such a beautiful, intelligent, amazing young lady. She puts up with her daddy’s antics, and I’m grateful to her for being with me in this exciting moment.

To Set the World Aflame releases in less than two weeks, friends.

Less. Than. Two. Weeks. Thanks be to God.

(Click here to get the book at a 40% discount.)

The good people at Brazos Press enlisted the help of an artist to animate the cover art for my book, To Set the World Aflame, and the result is utterly delightful! Here it is:

The animation wonderfully captures the whimsical nature of Shin Maeng’s original artwork.

You can see the scuba diver riding a whale as if he were a cross between Jonah and Jacques Cousteau, the lion lying down amicably with the drowsy dragon, the frog cheerfully beating on his drum, the child holding a giant record player, the sailboat rolling up and over waves of paint, and Christ standing at the center of it all.

Shin’s art perfectly captures the subtitle for my book: “How Artists Bear Witness to the Fullness of God’s Creation.” As I write in the book itself:

We’re three blessed weeks from the official release of the book and there’s still time for you to get an art print of Shin’s work. If you pre-order a copy of it through Brazos Press, you’ll get the print, but you’ll also get it at a 40% discount, which is better than anything you’ll get at Amazon.

It’s that time of year when the young people and, if you’re in graduate school, the not-so-young head back to school. Books are being purchased, new shoes acquired, routines drafted up, and meal plans planned out.

It’s a time of anticipation and, in some cases, plenty of anxiety.

I’ve got a batch of “Back to School” prayers included in my book with Phaedra, Prayers for the Pilgrimage: prayers for kids and high schoolers and teachers and administrators as well as prayers before taking a test (which used to be me) and before grading a test (which is now me).

But I’ve also got prayers that might come in handy at a time like this, some of which you’ll find in shareable form below.

I’ve got a prayer “For Beginnings,” whether for the kindergartners or the college freshman as well as a prayer “For Parents Sending their Children off to a New School,” because it’s often painful to see your wee one not be wee any more, leaving your home in a way that hurts the heart but also makes you immensely grateful for the God-given gift that they’ve been to you.

I’ve got a prayer “For Being Stressed Out” because…school. And life. And being human.

I’ve got a prayer “For Single Parents” because they deserve all of our admiration and support for doing it alone.

I’ve got a prayer “For When Things Don’t Go According to Plan” because that’s bound to happen at some point in the school year.

There’s a prayer “For a Day That’s Going Only Wrong” because…also life.

I’ve got prayers “For the Small Deeds Of Love That May Go Un-Noticed Or Un-Thanked” (because that’s a parent’s life) and “For a Grumpy Mood” (because that’s all of us at some point).

And for all the parents who drive their kids to school: I’ve got a prayer “For Driving through Traffic,” which is its special form of hell.

And because we all have days where we get our feelings hurt or feel especially alone, I’ve got a prayer “For Strength to Forgive those Who Have Hurt Us” and “For the Friendless.”

Either way, I hope you find something useful to your school-related circumstances in Prayers for the Pilgrimage and I pray God’s blessing on you and your family as you start up a new school year.

PS: If you’re feeling especially anxious for any reason or even for no obvious reason, here’s a good song for the heart, “Always With Me (Song for Anxiety),” by IAmSon.

Before I get on to the Bible and art question, let me mention two things. One, my book, To Set the World Aflame, releases a month from today, September 8. And, two, if you pre-order a copy of it from Brazos Press, you not only get it at a 40% discount, you’ll also get an art print of Shin Maeng's beautiful cover work. The prints are limited, so if you’d like one, don’t wait too long.

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS vs. WHAT WE BELIEVE IT SAYS

What does it mean to have a “biblical” vision for the arts? That’s one of the contested questions that I try to answer in my book, and as I argue throughout, it’s less straightforward than we might wish or imagine.

The answer to the question hinges not just on what we think the Bible says about the arts but on how we judge the artful manner in which the Bible says things. It hinges also on how we believe it authorizes practices of art.

The psalms, for example, enjoin us to be silent before the Almighty and yet we rarely we witness typically Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, who deeply cherish God’s living word, embracing meaningful silence in their corporate worship. The psalms also charge us to dance and to shout before the Lord in our praises, and yet these two expressions rarely, if ever, make an appearance in typically Reformed liturgical settings.

The point being, while the Bible explicitly commands the faithful to do these artistic things, and plenty more besides, Christians refuse to do them for all sorts of reasons, including among them their habits of reading the Bible.

The New Testament’s (relative) silence on architecture, visual art, sculpture, poetry, literature, theater, creativity, imagination, beauty and the rest likewise contributes to a confused and conflicted relation to the arts within church history, with some traditions recovering, while also transposing into a christological key, an Old Testament vision for the arts, and with other traditions leaving the whole thing behind in the realm of “figures & shadows.”

WHERE TO BEGIN OUR ASSESSMENT OF THE BIBLE’S ARTISTIC WAYS

What we make of the Bible’s thoughts on the arts has everything to do with where we start the conversation. Do we begin, for example, as Makoto Fujimura or Flannery O’Connor do, with Genesis 1 and 2, with its story of God crafting the primordial creation and his command to cultivate the earth?

Do we start with Exodus 31 and the Spirit-empowered work of Bezalel, as Philip Ryken does, in order to elicit principles for artmaking today? Or does that result in an artists-are-more-special-because-they-are-uniquely-endowed-by-the-Holy Spirit idea?

Do we go to the Book of Psalms, as Calvin Seerveld claims we should, and find there the answer to our question? Do we build off of the artistically inflected activities of the prophets or the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels?

Or the Book of Revelation: Might its hyper-realist vision of a world turned upside down by the coming of the resurrected Christ illumine the path for artists of faith today?

Wherever we go in the Bible, it will never be neutral. It will always put our theological, historical, and cultural biases on display. It’ll tell the reader a great deal about how we believe the Bible should be read to discover the proper shape of an artist’s vocation. Orthodox, Presbyterian, and Mennonite Christians, for instance, all go to the Bible in order to discern a right response to the arts. What they conclude, however, is wildly divergent.

What, then, does the Bible say about the arts? How does it say it? And what do we make of it all for the vocation of artists? These are the questions that I aim to answer in my book, To Set the World Aflame.

READING THE BIBLE ARTFULLY

Once we pay attention, however, to how God through human authors chooses to disclose the divine life, we discover a God who loves the arts. We discover a God who not only commends specific forms of art, which would have been common to the day, we also discover a God who communicates his good purposes for human beings in artistic and aesthetic ways.

We see, for example, how approximately 33% of the Bible comes to us through poetry. We encounter narratives that are chockfull of similes and symbols. We witness authors who “tell by showing.” We see how creation is the theater of God’s glory and how all of God’s creatures live and move and have their being in the One who choreographs all things in harmony.

We see how God’s judgments occur through acts of performance art, how his salvation is scented and color-coded, and how his supreme revelation confronts us in the form of a True Icon (Col. 1:15). We see how God’s kingdom is un-imaginable apart from the imagination.

Holy Scripture does all these things, it should be stressed, not because ancient peoples couldn’t handle prose or propositional ideas.

It’s not because they were “un-cultured” Philistines, indulging in “worldly” things. It’s not because they had settled for “milk” (waste-full art) and would one day grow an appetite for “meat” (worth-full doctrine).

It’s because the Spirit of God delights to use these media to inspire the love of God in us. The true knowledge of God comes through, not despite, such aesthetic features, for our God speaks in many literary tongues. “The Bible is a work of art,” Steve Turner writes in Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts. We do well not to forget this fact, because it tells something crucially important about the nature of the Triune God whom we confess and about our own nature as those who have been made in the image of that same God.

We do well also not to forget that modern categories of art are decidedly foreign to the cultural worlds of Holy Scripture. Most of the art that we find in the Bible serves, not its own purposes, but secondary purposes, such as the liturgy of Israel, or the commerce of merchants, or the politics of the ruling class. It’s what we might call utilitarian art; and those who created it would be properly called artisans, not “fine artists.”

Scripture’s central concern is life lived under the sovereign and redemptive rule of God, and as such it is chiefly concerned with art that serves liturgical and ethical formation, not the disinterested contemplation of art’s aesthetic qualities. If art can be found that its makers appreciate for primarily aesthetic reasons, this will usually show up in implicit rather than explicit manner.

Is the Bible pro-art? If by art we mean "art for art’s sake,” like Toni Morrison’s Beloved or T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets or Picasso’s Guernica or Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring or Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman or Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, then the answer is no. Not really.

It’s not that a justification for such art cannot be made within the world of Holy Scripture. It’s that one will have to learn to read the Bible differently in order to justify such art as well as to encourage the creation of such art.

I explore these ideas and questions and plenty more in my book, To Set the World Aflame, which, again, releases September 8. And I’m profoundly grateful to for her generous endorsement of the book.

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PS: The two videos here are from The Book of Kells Experience that we saw at Trinity College, Dublin. And, yes, it was amaze, amaze, amaze.

This past Tuesday I shared a devotional with our faculty at Fuller Seminary. If you read it, it’ll be important to keep a few things in mind.

First, this is a devotional. It’s not a sermon or a lecture. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it says only so much. It doesn’t say all that one could or should say on the topic but it says enough, I think, enough to generate good conversations.

Second, what I’m addressing in this devotional is what I’ll call garden variety frustration. It’s the kind of frustration that any relatively healthy community will experience at some point in its life, and it’s to be distinguished from toxic and dysfunctional communities. The former will need to be treated differently to the latter, but neither should be confused with the kind of frustration that any decent community faces at some point.

Our faculty community is neither toxic nor dysfunctional. It’s just human.

And when humans try to get stuff done which involves a host of disparate convictions, divergent opinions, and deeply held feelings, frustration often shows up. Sometimes it shows up with plenty of advance notice, at other times it appears in surprising and sudden ways. That’s what I’m addressing in this devotional.

Third, the frustration that we experience in a marriage, or in a congregation, or within a ministry organization, or across ecclesial networks can lead to one of two outcomes: a good one or a bad one. If the frustration is longstanding and acute, and if it remains unaddressed (for any number of reasons), then it risks metastasizing into despair, judgy attitudes, self-protective measures, and corrosive effects.

It’s easier to retreat to your safe corner, surrounded by your tribe, whether literal or only in your head, than to risk vulnerability, to venture the right hand of fellowship, to wonder how you might have misunderstood the other side, or to try again. It’s easier to think the worst rather than the best of your counterparts. It’s easier to give up.

What helps us to avoid these tendencies? Plenty of things. One of the things that proves especially helpful is a new story. Such a story will help you to reimagine yourself or your counterparts in ways that will not only make sense of seeming senseless things but also enable you to move toward rather than away from others.

That’s what this little devotional reflection aims to imagine. You can either read it here or listen to it by clicking the audio clip above.

What do you do with yourself when you grow weary of the people you work with?

They irk you. They ask dumb questions. They’re full of themselves, and they can’t see or don’t want to see it. They jockey for positions of privilege and take an inordinate love of titles of honor. They grumble about all the wrong things and they fail to speak up for the things you know are right and good.

They find clever ways to define who really gets it and who doesn’t. They speak blessing out of one side of their mouths but, behind closed doors, or even in front of doors, stand at the ready to call down the fire of heaven upon those who have gotten it, as they see it, stupendously wrong.

I’m talking, of course, about the disciples of Jesus. The disciples get on each other’s nerves, they bicker, they nag, they bargain for power, and they often feel unimpeachably right about their role as insiders to Christ’s mission.

One moment, for the disciples, there’s no “I” in team and they’re wholly unified in their obedience to Jesus. The next moment it’s every man for himself and they turn on each other.

They don’t get what Jesus is on about, not really, and they’re stuck inside an old wineskin about God’s Messiah. The pressure seems to be always high, the questions seem to be never-ending, and the fear of the unknown—of how things will turn out—becomes paralyzing at times.

At other times, the stress of the life they’ve chosen to live and the work they’ve chosen to embrace causes them to say a lot of rash things and to do a lot of destructive things, sometimes self-destructive, sometimes destructive of the fabric of their community.

It’s circumstances, I imagine, that may resonate with some of us here.

So what does Jesus do with his disciples?

He does many things. He teaches. He rebukes. He encourages. He listens. He models a better way. But one of the things that he does that proves to be unusually effective is the telling of a story.

The disciples are stuck inside a story about messiahs and power and leadership and good guys and bad guys and how the whole thing ends up, and Jesus understands how a good story might rescue them from the prison of a half-baked or wholly false story.

I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know. You already know about the disciples and about Jesus and about the power of story. That’s why you teach here. You get these things and you try to help your students get these things too. And I say amen to that.

But what’s much harder is seeing outside of the story that find yourself living at the present moment, a story that, on certain days, threatens to crush you under, because you find yourself living a miserable groundhog-day tale.

It’s a tale of people with power and people without power. It’s a tale of things never changing and things always changing. It’s a tale of factions and finances and friggin’ meetings that go nowhere.

You’re like Bill Murray waking up to Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” The first time it’s funny. The second time it’s funny and weird. The third time it’s just weird. But when it keeps happening over and over again, you start getting annoyed and confused.

It’s a time loop that causes you to begin feeling depressed and desperate. You resort to survival tactics in order to stay sane or you devolve to the role you’ve played your whole life: the hero, the clown, the rescuer, the quiet one, the good one, the parent.

You’re tired of being in the same story and you can’t figure out how it’ll end, or whether you want to stick around to see how this story plays out.

What you need, amongst other things, is a new story. Which is precisely what Jesus offers to his disciples.

In Jesus’s case, he told his stories of wise and foolish builders, of farmers, and nets, and virgins, all of which asked:

What if?

What if God is this way and not that? What if God’s kingdom comes to us in these ways, not those ways? What if greatness and mercy and winning and losing are far different and far better than you had ever imagined them to be? And what if there’s a better story for your life, one that you can’t as-yet apprehend but that calls out the best in you by God’s grace?

In her 1970 collection of essays, The White Album, Joan Didion writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” What if there’s a good story that we could be telling that became life-giving to us as faculty? And what if you were the one that had that story near at hand? Would you be willing to share it with us?

In her 2014 acceptance speech for the Newbery Award which she won for her novel, Flora & Ulysses, which tells the tale of cynicism and divorce and death and heartbreak and superhero squirrels through the lens of a ten-year old girl Flora Buckman, Kate DiCamillo said:

What if there’s a story that you could tell that might enlarge our hearts in a way that made them capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries and contradictions of ourselves and of each other?

Here’s a last thing about story. In his 1977 book, Truthfulness and Tragedy, Stanley Hauerwas asserted that “The test of each story is the sort of person it shapes.” What if the stories we keep telling ourselves about our lot here are misshaping us? And what if there’s a story that could make us just a smidgen more true, more holy, more whole, more, in short, like Jesus himself?

My point here? We need good ideas, yes, and good plans, and good leadership, and good decisions. We need the Holy Spirit most certainly.

But I wonder if we also need a good story just as much and whether you might have a good one to tell?

A good story will not solve all of our problems, of course, but it might make the problems that we face not feel so acutely debilitating or dispiriting.

A good story might enable us to imagine each other—as faculty and staff and board—not as members of rival factions but as members of Christ’s body, miraculously stitched together by the Spirit of God and bound together for such a time as this by the grace of God.

A good story might rescue us from feeling like we’re stuck in an economy of scarcity, where there’s seemingly never enough time, never enough energy, never enough desire, never enough hope in order to do the job that we feel God has called us to.

A good story might help us, finally, to see what we can’t see on our own efforts: that God has not abandoned us here, that God’s grace is quietly at work within and among us, that God’s salvation is happening here, in this place, this people, this time.

What if? That’s the question.

I’ll end my devotional with a prayer that I included in my book, Prayers for the Pilgrimage, that’s titled “A Prayer For Grace in the Face of Contentious Relationships”:

I wrote three liturgies for a conference on “The Art of the Psalms” this past weekend. I drew inspiration from the hymnal, Psalms for All Seasons, and from things that I do with my own students in class. The parameters for these two liturgies were strict: they needed to follow a reflection I’d give on the topic and they couldn’t be longer than five minutes each. They’re bite-sized, in short, rather than anything that might fill out an entire worship service.

I figured I’d share two of these liturgies here in case they were useful to anybody during the season of Lent. They could be used for personal devotional reasons, or for small groups journeying together, or at a special service during the “Forty Days,” such as Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, or be incorporated within an existing service of corporate worship.

I share them because I don’t care a great deal about keeping them to myself but about providing resources to Christians that would enable them to enter more meaningfully and more deeply into the liturgical life of the church through the arts for the sake of a transformative encounter with the living God. If you do use one of them and it turns out well, I’d certainly love to hear it. I’m always open to feedback for other ways of praying these topics.

Either way, I pray this serves you well as you begin your journey of Lent. As the Book of Common Prayer puts it in its Liturgy for Ash Wednesday, which occurs a week from today:

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the
observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance;
by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and
meditating on God's holy Word. And, to make a right beginning
of repentance, and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now
kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer.

If you’re interested in writing your own Psalm of Lament or Psalm of Imprecation, which could serve the purposes of spiritual formation within your own life or community, you could see these two examples I’ve created. I did so in conversation with things that I’ve written in my book, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life, around these general themes.

Here then are two liturgies: one for the sadnesses of our lives and one for the angers of our lives. May the Lord, in his mercy, hear our prayers.

A LITURGY OF LAMENT (drawing on Psalms 12-13, 42-43)

Leader:

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

Refrain:

O Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Answer us when we call out to you.

A moment of silence is taken to commend to God the griefs of this world.

Leader:

How long must I bear pain in my soul,

and have sorrow in my heart all day long.

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Refrain:

O Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Answer us when we call out to you.

A moment of silence is taken to commend to God the griefs of our nation.

Leader:

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God.

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,

Refrain:

O Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Answer us when we call out to you.

A moment of silence is taken to commend to God the griefs of our home church.

Leader:

My enemy will say, ‘I have prevailed’;

my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

Refrain:

O Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Answer us when we call out to you.

A moment of silence is taken to commend to God the griefs of our families and friends.

Leader:

But I trusted in your steadfast love;

my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

Refrain:

O Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Answer us when we call out to you.

A moment of silence is taken to commend to God the griefs of our own lives.

Leader:

I will sing to the Lord,

because he has dealt bountifully with me.

Refrain:

The Lord is my song,

The Lord is my praise.

The Lord is the wellspring of life,

And the lifter of my head.

Leader (via Prayers for the Pilgrimage):

O Lord, you who draw near to the broken in body and in spirit, do not be deaf to our pain, bring an end to our distress, preserve our lives, rescue us and heal us, we pray, so that we might join the company of those who take refuge in you and praise your holy name. We pray this in the name of Jesus, a Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief, on whom we cast all our cares. Amen.

A LITURGY OF IMPRECATION (drawing on Psalm 37:1-13)

Leader:

Do not fret because of those who are evil

or be envious of those who do wrong;

for like the grass they will soon wither,

like green plants they will soon die away.

Trust in the Lord and do good;

dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.

Take delight in the Lord.

and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Refrain (sung together via Taizé, “Wait For The Lord”):

Wait for the Lord,

Whose day is near.

Wait for the Lord,

Be strong, take heart.

Leader:

Commit your way to the Lord;

trust in him and he will do this:

He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn,

your vindication like the noonday sun.

Be still before the Lord,

and wait patiently for him;

do not fret when people succeed in their ways;

when they carry out their wicked schemes.

Refrain from anger and turn from wrath,

do not fret—it leads only to evil.

Refrain (sung together):

Wait for the Lord,

Whose day is near.

Wait for the Lord,

Be strong, take heart.

Leader:

For those who are evil will be destroyed,

but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land.

A little while, and the wicked will be no more;

though you look for them, they will not be found.

But the meek will inherit the land

and enjoy peace and prosperity.

The wicked plot against the righteous

and gnash their teeth at them;

but the Lord laughs at the wicked,

for he knows their day is coming.

Refrain (sung together):

Wait for the Lord,

Whose day is near.

Wait for the Lord,

Be strong, take heart.

Leader:

The salvation of the righteous comes from the Lord;
he is their stronghold in time of trouble.

The Lord helps them and delivers them;
he delivers them from the wicked and saves them,
because they take refuge in him.

Refrain (sung together):

Wait for the Lord,

Whose day is near.

Wait for the Lord,

Be strong, take heart.

Leader (via Prayers for the Pilgrimage):

O Lord, you whose holy anger heals, take our burning words and protect us from the desire for revenge; by the power of your Spirit, keep our angers from turning violent or destructive, and make our anger instead a faithful anger, so that it might become fuel for the mending of all the broken things in our world. We pray this in the name of Jesus, the Just Judge, the Sovereign of the nations, and the Prince of Peace. Amen.

“Harass these hecklers, God, punch these bullies in the nose.” — Ps. 35:1 (MSG)

In the final episode of the final season of “Stranger Things,” a whip-smart middle school kid, Erica Sinclair, teams up with her science teacher, Mr. Clarke, in order to save the world. Their particular job at this point in the drama is to hijack the security system on a military base so that their friends can drive through the compound and into the Upside Down, that extra-dimensional world of monsters and nightmares that feeds on fear and death.

Standing at the top of the belltower of Hawkins Presbyterian Church in the middle of the night, when all the scary things usually happen, they keep watch on behalf of the crew.

C: “Do you think they’re alright?”

E: “The truck is faster than a Humvee. Let’s be conservative: five miles faster. They have a head-start. They’re fine. For now. But the real shit hasn’t started yet.

C: “Erica…language, please.”

E: “This isn’t intro to science. This situation demands cussing. [After a beat.] So how does it feel?”

C: “What?”

E: “Helping to save the world and all that.”

C: “It feels pretty swell. [After a beat.] Pretty God-damn swell.”

I think Erica and Mr. C are on to something here, about the way language works and about the real point of cussing, and I think the psalmists would agree.

All throughout the psalms, we come across what can only be described as obscene language, what scholars have termed imprecatory: “May his children be wandering beggars” (Ps. 109:10). “Erase their names from the Book of Life” (Ps. 69:28). “Blessed be one who dashes your children against the rock” (Ps. 137:9). “Burn down their houses” (Ps. 69:25, MSG).

These psalms imprecate, which is to say, they petition God to exact severe judgment against an oppressor.

The psalmist’s experience of violence, whether physical or verbal, provokes hyperbolic language in order to give expression to the shocking violation of God’s world. The psalmist lets loose a string of curses when he witnesses the violation of human dignity. He swears to heaven when he sees the desecration of creation. He cusses in the face of God-damnable acts of injustice and cruelty. And he deploys profane language in order to decry the profanation of the weak and needy and vulnerable of this world.

These are prayers of the angry and, as God would have it, they belong on the lips of the saints in the face of all the accursed things of this world. As I write in an essay that I published on May 27, 2022, in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas:

“Our world is a violent one and the Bible does not allow us to ignore its violence or to explain it away with tidy theological slogans. It asks us to face our world squarely, together, and, where needed, to yell our rage to God. The Bible invites us to get angry at God, because he can handle all our bitter, angry tears and curses. And such words need to be said out loud, because that’s partly how we keep the chaos of violence from taking root in our own hearts.”

(This is also a point that I make at length in my book, Open and Unafraid, if you’re curious how I came to this conclusion.)

I imagine you have things that cause you to feel enraged these days.

Politicians spin Orwellian lies with impunity. Influencers stoke the flames of hatred. Systemic racism leads to cycles of violence. Wars displace the innocent. “Tech bros” unleash godlike instruments that prey upon the insecurities of the young in the name of “freedom.” Human trafficking continues unabated. And many millions around the globe are forcibly displaced due to human rights violations and turned into refugees.

The danger, of course, is that our angers will consume us and turn us into versions of that which we hate: returning evil for evil, exacting eye for eye, and issuing our own imperious FAFO threats that serve only to increase the chaos and to propagate fear.

God knows this will become a temptation for us and has supplied the saints with language not simply to rescue us from that particular temptation but to give faithful voice to the rage inside.

The psalms in this way show us how to curse in context, how to swear without sinning, and, as Eugene Peterson once put it, how to cuss without cussing.

In my class on the psalms at Fuller Seminary, we not only explore the nature and function of imprecatory prayers within the Psalter, we also give our students a chance to write their own imprecatory psalms. It’s a disciplined exercise, it should be said, that comes with plenty of warnings and guardrails. As I explain things in Open and Unafraid:

Praying against one’s enemies is most emphatically not a license to do violence to others. Nor is it an invitation to indulge our irresponsible desires to call anybody we do not like an enemy. It’s instead a way to get us to entrust ourselves to God. It is in this sense that the psalms of anger are essentially prayers of relinquishment. To pray this rhetoric of violence is to cede to God my desire to become violent: “Your will be done,” we pray.

Nor is praying against one’s enemies a matter of venting in private or throwing a tantrum in public. Praying these prayers is a matter of honestly naming the rage, the sorrow, the feeling of utter helplessness, the acute sense of injustice, and the irrationality of it all in order to commit one’s enemies to the God who alone exacts perfect vengeance.

In praying such prayers, we beseech God to Act now! Defend the weak! Rescue the needy! Vindicate the innocent! Fight against the law keepers who twist the evidence, the bullies who hide behind their cowardice, the drug-traffickers who victimize the weak, the sexual predators, the warmongers, the abusive religious, the advertisers who care only for profit!

A final thing to say is that such prayers are not a passive thing. We don’t just pray. We also do justice. We don’t simply bemoan the tragic losses that daily mark our world. We also stand up for the poor, the needy, the widowed, the orphaned, the vulnerable, the alien, the stranger, and all who are oppressed.

The psalms demand that we live as citizens of God’s peaceable kingdom—but they also invite us to enact the justice of such a kingdom. Justice is the way we make things right, put things back, give people their due in Jesus’ name. And faith would always have us believe that God will make all things right in the end—will make “the justice of [our] cause shine like the noonday” (Ps. 37:6).

We do justice. We do mercy. We walk humbly with God. And, with W. E. B. Du Bois, we trust also “in the ultimate justice of things,” in the “God of Right” and in the Last Judgment, where all wrongs shall be made right and all the falsely accused shall be vindicated.

For such a time as this and others like it in human history, God gives us both permission and precedent for praying the psalms of imprecation.

Like nuclear power, they need to be handled with great care, but the psalmists show us the way forward, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer shows us the only way in which they can be prayed without doing damage to our own soul and to the bodies of others:

“Only the person who is totally free of his own desire for revenge and free of hate and who is sure not to use his prayers to satisfy his own lust for revenge—only such a person can pray with a pure heart: ‘Shatter the fangs of the young lions, O Lord, break the teeth in their mouth’.”

Only the person, that is, who stands at the foot of the cross of Christ and has reckoned with their own sin and the judgment which that sin demands and the mercy that is offered, and the Love which forgives enemies, can pray such a psalm with integrity and not be undone by such a prayer.

I’m including here the instructions that I give my own students for crafting a psalm of imprecation. The key piece of advice is #8: Share your psalm with trusted others.

While such a psalm will do us plenty of good personally and can no doubt be kept to ourselves on plenty of occasions, they perform their truest healing work within the company of God’s people, so they can be with us and for us by God’s Spirit in the hour of trial and temptation.

TASK:

1. Before writing, take a moment to pray. Ask God to “search you” and “know you,” to borrow the language of Psalm 139, to see if there is any “evil” way within you that might make the writing of this psalm a harmful rather than helpful thing.

2. Choose the type, write, and title your psalm. Working with the basic shape of a curse psalm (see below), choose whether you wish to write an individual or a communal prayer. Based on your choice, write and title your psalm.

3. Take advantage of the language of the Psalter. Keep your phrases succinct. Be specific and concrete in your statements. Choose evocative imagery or metaphors. Feel free to borrow as much as you wish from the language of the Psalter. It’ll serve you as a good guide.

4. Let your psalm sit and settle. Before sharing your psalm with others, let it sit so that it can settle and become chiefly the offering of your heart to God. Let it be sufficient for now that God is the principal recipient of your angers. Pray that your own sanctification will result from this spiritual exercise.

5. Share your psalms with others. While you may write your psalm in anger, do not post it publicly in anger. Doing so risks giving in to the temptation of “telling others off” in way that results in self-gratification but not in a communal good. Share your psalm first with trusted others before sharing it with strangers who will have little meaningful context for your prayer. Discern with them when and how you might share your psalm publicly.

THE BASIC SHAPE OF IMPRECATION PSALMS:

The basic shape of an imprecatory psalm follows the basic shape of psalms of lament because it, too, is a lament. Psalm 12 is typical of such psalms. It begins with a complaint by the faithful, it transitions to a petition of God, and it ends with a response by the faithful.

Complaint

1 Help, O Lord, for there is no longer anyone who is godly;

the faithful have disappeared from humankind.

2 They utter lies to each other;

with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.

Petition

3 May the Lord cut off all flattering lips,

the tongue that makes great boasts,

4 those who say, “With our tongues we will prevail;

our lips are our own—who is our master?”

5 “Because the poor are despoiled, because the needy groan,

I will now rise up,” says the Lord;

“I will place them in the safety for which they long.”

6 The promises of the Lord are promises that are pure,

silver refined in a furnace on the ground,

purified seven times.

Resolution

7 You, O Lord, will protect us;

you will guard us from this generation forever.

8 On every side the wicked prowl,

as vileness is exalted among humankind.

WRITE YOUR OWN PSALM OF IMPRECATION:

(See examples in Psalms for All Seasons for examples of settings of curse psalms: Psalms 5, 6, 11, 12, 35, 37, 52, 54, 69, 79, 83, 109, 137, and 143.)

TITLE:

Write three statements of COMPLAINT for the speaker:

Write REFRAIN of acclamation or prayer to God that the whole congregation can with integrity say “amen” to:

(Example of acclamation: “O Lord, only you can make all things new.”)

(Example of prayer: “Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.”)

Write three statements of PETITION for the speaker:

Write REFRAIN of acclamation or prayer to God for the congregation:

Write three statements of RESOLUTION for the speaker:

Write REFRAIN of acclamation or prayer to God for the congregation:

“By placing unattended rage before God, we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self, face to face with a God who loves and does justice. Hidden in the dark chambers of our hearts and nourished by the system of darkness, hate grows and seeks to infest everything with its hellish will to exclusion. In the light of the justice and love of God, however, hate recedes and the seed is planted for the miracle of forgiveness.” – Miroslav Volf (as quoted in David Stowe, Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137, 171)

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“It is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is common in all writing and among the best of writers.” – E. B. White, Elements of Style

(This is a repost from a piece that I published first with .)

I wrote the following liturgy after sending off to my publisher the requested revisions. Brazos Press had asked that I cut 17,000 words from the manuscript that I had submitted to them originally, which had only just received its official title, To Set the World Aflame.

At the time, I couldn’t fathom cutting that much. I knew it would come chiefly from the footnotes, but still. 5,000 words? That I could imagine. 17,000? That was like a small booklet’s worth.

I started with the easy stuff: the obvious redundancies, the surplus quotes, the off-stage commentary on scholarly debates. After completing that initial task, I paused to count up the words, hoping that I had completed the job sufficiently. I’d only cut 7,000. I had another 10k to go. At this point, I had to look for entire paragraphs and whole stories to discard. These I had worked hard to craft, but these too would have to go.

By the end of a week’s worth of work, I had managed to cut another 7,000 words. I still had 3,000 left.

At this point in the process, a more surgical approach would be needed. I couldn’t cut mindlessly; I’d have to cut with great care. The last thing I wanted was to end up with a Frankenstein of parts—blunt transitions, truncated sentences, ill-fitting phrases, and a shape that more skeletal than spare. If I wasn’t careful, the flow of meaning from chapter to chapter would make sense only in my own head but not to the reader.

While the first round of cutting was relatively easy, this final round of cutting turned out to be rather painful. It was here that the proverbial darlings would need to be killed. (For the curious, the phrase derives not from Faulkner or Chekov but from a lesser known writer, Arthur Quiller-Couch, who in a 1914 lecture, given at Cambridge University, urged would-be writers to “murder” their darlings.)

The work wound up being mentally exhausting and it took me far longer than I had expected, because I had to completely reimagine large chunks of the book. The fault, admittedly, was of my own making. I had proposed eighteen chapters and five mini-interludes. The interludes, however, had turned into proper chapters and I’d generated a prologue and an epilogue, both of which turned out to be chapter-length.

There was no point in crying over the spilt milk, but it hurt all the same.

When I finally turned in the second draft of the manuscript, I found myself feeling both happy and refreshed. Further revisions would come, no doubt, and I would discover plenty of things to cut and tweak, but the book was leaner and cleaner and meaner. Some of the darlings, in the end, turned out not to be darlings but only excess, while other darlings were cut with a great deal of sighs and self-pitying feelings.

Writing the liturgy served, for me, as both a cathartic act and an act of gratitude. I needed a moment to let things go, to get closure, as it were, as well as to say thanks to all the words that had performed a good purpose in the original manuscript but no longer served the purposes of the book itself.

Not wanting to take the process too seriously, moreover, I kept the liturgy light, and I decided to end with a litany of gratitude so that the liturgy would end with things beyond my own self-concern. Whether it is useful to anyone else, time will tell. But my hope is that it will offer writers a way to sacralize this aspect of the writing process rather than seeing it only as a miserable waystation on the way to more-exciting things.

Even with words that can and should be cut, such words appeared for a moment on the page or the screen, and deserve to be dignified with a proper farewell, it seems to me.

I’m still cutting and whittling, and only God knows what words will remain in the final cut of the book. But it’s good to give thanks for the darlings. They may be destined to be killed off, but like the redshirts in every Star Trek movie, they served their purpose for a glorious, if only short-lived, moment.

A LITURGY FOR KILLING YOUR DARLINGS

by W. David O. Taylor

A PRAYER OF RESOLVE

(To be said prior to the initial work of editing

a book, article, essay, novel, script, poem, etc.)

O Lord, three things I ask of you this day:

To know what must be cut, make me wise, I pray.

To cut what must be cut, make me brave, I pray.

To cut until the cutting is done, make me strong, I pray.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

A PRAYER OF PETITION

(To be said prior to the work of individual editing tasks)

O God, guide me in this good but demanding work and guard me from fear, I pray, so that I may produce a work that might result in your glory and to the benefit of my neighbor. Amen.

A PRAYER OF THANKS

(To be said after all the work of editing has been completed)

In the name of the God who puts all things in their proper place: I give thanks this day for all the words that will never see the light of day.

For that paragraph that perished in the first round of revisions: I give thanks.

For that story that told the same tale twice and needed to be sacrificed for the sake of one truly good one: I give thanks.

For that sentence that sounded so good on the page but needed to be sequestered to the overflow bin: I give thanks.

For that clause that contributed nothing of importance to the point at hand and needed to be cut: I give thanks.

For that phrase that had to be phased out because it congested the sentence: I give thanks.

For that quote that begged to be kept in but quit the page once it realized that it represented one too-many quotable quotes: I give thanks.

For that word that said it all but said too much and so needed to be sheared off: I give thanks.

For those three adjectives that sang a noun’s praises one too-many times and needed to be trimmed down in order to sing its praises just right: I give thanks.

For those two adverbs that burdened a verb with far too-many demands and needed to be reduced to one alone: I give thanks.

For that footnote that gave evidence of the author’s extraordinary powers of intelligence but bored the reader with idiosyncratic and irrelevant matter: I give thanks.

For that appendix that burst the word-count limit and would have been so wonderful to include but could not: I give thanks.

A PRAYER OF PRAISE

(To be said after the work has been sent off to a publisher)

Praise the Lord for editors who say no to authors who think they know better but do not.

Praise the Lord for attentive readers who care enough to tell an author what is not working.

Praise the Lord for strangers who bring to an author’s attention blind spots and deficiencies.

Praise the Lord for friends who, in love, tell an author that it is time, finally, to be done.

Praise the Lord for family who remind an author of what really matters at the end of the day.

Praise the Lord for the Spirit who bears witness to the painful work of “killing your darlings.”

Praise the Lord for the Son who confirms the goodness of one’s calling to write.

Praise the Lord from whom all blessings flow.

Praise the Lord.

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I’m starting a new thing on Instagram: what I’m calling a “90-Second Video Book Review” that’ll happen once-a-week. It’s less a review, granted, than an enthusiastic recommendation, but hopefully it’ll introduce folks to good books that could nourish the mind and heart, or expand their imaginations, or acquaint them with a new author or community of artists, or scholars, or arts advocates and patrons, or serve readers in some practical way.

(If I had more time, I’d do a proper book review, or a Five-Minute Video Review. But I’ve already got a full-time job, and my part-time job, as a priest, keeps me plenty occupied, so this is the best I can do under the circumstances. But something is better than nothing, I figure, and with the habit of reading of books plummeting like a rocket booster by 40% over the past twenty years, I’ll do what I can to increase it infinitesimally.)

As I’ve written my book on the calling of artists for Brazos Press over the past year, I’ve had a chance to re-read books that I’ve collected over the past 30 years as well as read books that I’ve acquired for the work at hand.

Some of those new books I discovered serendipitously, in the footnotes of other books, for example, or in hidden corners of the Internet, published by obscure publishing houses. There are so many good ones.

The sad reality of a book like To Set the World Aflame is that you can’t quote every book that you’ve loved, or even include it in the endnotes.

I have added a series of appendices at the back of the book with various recommended reading lists (e.g., “Theology Books for Artists,” “Art Books for Pastors,” “Novels about Artists”), but even that section doesn’t allow me to tell readers about all the amazing books on the arts that exist in our world.

So this is my chance to rectify that fact...mostly.

My 90-Second Reviews will include five sections: The Who, the What, the Why, the For Whom, and a Fun Fact. In the case of my review of this week’s book by Lanta Davis, Becoming by Beholding, it’s a book that I would have purchased for the title and subtitle alone. But the contents are quite fabulous too.

Hope you enjoy it!

There’s no such thing, really, as “Best of,” not in any absolute sense, at least. There’s only “What I really liked at a particular time and place,” and given different circumstances or moods, I might have chosen otherwise. This holds true for the usual “Best Books of the Year” lists and an amateur’s collection such as this one. With that caveat in place, here are the books, movies, television shows, and music that caught my attention in 2025.

BEST THEOLOGY BOOKS OF 2025

I’m always on the lookout for books that gather up the wisdom of the church in the Global South and these three books did not disappoint. IVP’s First Nations Version: Psalms and Proverbs represents another marvelous entry in their series of Indigenous Bible translations. Its authors make the language of the Psalter come alive in dynamic and memorable ways—in ways, in fact, that feel closer to the kick-you-in-the-teeth quality of the original Hebrew.

In Prophet, Priest, and King: Christology in Global Perspective, editors Horton, Mburu, and Holcomb enlist scholars from the Majority World in order to give fresh perspective to the Munus Triplex of Christ. I’ve grounded my own sense of an artist’s missional calling in my book, To Set the World Aflame, on Christ’s threefold office as prophet, priest and king, and I am grateful to this community of scholars for helping me to see what I could not see on my own about this facet of the doctrine of Christ.

In my theology class at Fuller, I ask my students to read Justo González’ The Mestizo Augustine: A Theologian Between Two Cultures. I do so to help them understand Augustine in context rather than as a series of theological abstractions. Catherine Conybeare’s book, Augustine the African, will pair nicely with the González reading. It’ll not only help my students understand how theology is always shaped by and shaping of a cultural context; it’ll also help them to see how theology today is doing the very same thing.

BEST SPIRITUAL FORMATION BOOKS OF 2025

I thoroughly loved reading ’ Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation and wished more people knew of it. She frames her book with the three categories of orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy, and helps readers understand how necessary and powerful the imagination is to proper spiritual formation. Jesus, of course, might say, “I told so…a long time ago,” but we modern folk need help appreciating Jesus’ advice, and Davis does that in spades.

Existing within a parallel universe is ’s latest, Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life. Having done work on virtue ethics for my PhD studies at Duke, I’ve tried to help my own students appreciate this particular model for discipleship. I’ve written a chapter titled, “On the Virtues and Practices of Artists,” in my forthcoming book with Brazos Press, and I’ve always felt grateful to authors who make this tradition of spiritual formation come alive rather than feel like a deadly serious enterprise. Grace accomplishes this goal in such a lovely way and without ever making her readers feel dumb for coming “late to the game.”

BEST CHILDREN’S BOOKS OF 2025

My wife Phaedra and I collect children’s book like a philatelist collects stamps: with a dogged joy. This isn’t, really, because we have children of our own who love to read. It’s because we believe, with C. S. Lewis, that adults need children’s book as much as children do, and that a “children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”

That’s why we were so happy to get a copy of Ben Myers’ book, The Apostles Creed: For All God’s Children, with art by Natasha Kennedy.

(Nota Bene: When you commend an illustrated book, please remember to include the illustrator/artist alongside the author. Failing to do so is 100% lame and a failure to honor to whom honor is due.)

I love how Myers tells the story of the Creed, and I absolutely love the refrain that he includes at the end of each section: “That’s what I believe.” It’s such a playful but also profoundly theological way to say things. Kennedy’s paintings are realistic to the physiognomy of Jesus’ home world and to the beautiful Global Body of Christ, and they add a whimsical element to the book.

I’m not Roman Catholic but I love my Roman Catholic friends. And they make some pretty cool stuff, like ’s The Story of All Stories: A Story Bible for Young Catholics, with illustrations by Diana Renzina. Again: you don’t have to be Catholic or even a “Young Catholic” to enjoy this Bible. In fact, there’s not a heck of a lot that’s conspicuously Catholic about the Bible, except the fact that it’s published by Word on Fire and that it includes Tobit and the Maccabees. It also includes super cool quotes from Saint Irenaeus, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, loads of Saint Augustine, and a Pope or two or three.

BEST ARTIST BOOKS OF 2025

All of the books I read about artists this year have this in common: “Being An Artist is Hard.” The second thing they have in common is this: “Making Work that You’re Proud of May Well Involve Suffering of Some Sort But It Will be Worth It (you hope).”

Some days it sucks to be an artist, other days you want to give up; still other days you need a break in order to clear your head. But if you stick with it, you may make something that’s truly good and that might bless the world in powerful ways, even if that world is “only” your family and friends. My head space for 2025 has been in the arts, which means, with more space, I’d include twice the number books here, but for now we’ll settle for seven.

On the advice of my former student and founding member of the Ekklesia Contemporary Ballet in Middletown Connecticut, Morley van Yperen, I read Revelations: The Autobiography of Alvin Ailey. Nobody comes from nowhere and nobody becomes famous overnight. These are both truisms, but it’s good to be reminded of that fact with life stories like Ailey’s, which involved a great deal of suffering and sorrow but also a great deal of beauty and tenacity and work that will keep on moving people.

A similar story of pain and beauty is told in Joy Harjo memoir, Crazy Brave. Combining poetry and Native folklore, Harjo’s memoir, which won the 2013 PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction, chronicles the first two decades of her life. The onetime U.S. Poet Laureate and citizen of the Muscogee Nation doesn’t just tell the story of her life. She makes you feel the story in visceral and lyrical ways.

The pain and the beauty of Michelangelo’s life and work is told in Irving Stone’s biographical novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy. The research that Stone invests in this project is extraordinary, but it’s less the historical facticity that moves the reader. It’s, well, the agony and the ecstasy’s of Michelangelo’s labors that causes a reader to want to buy a one-way ticket to Florence in order to see the artworks in person.

I begin my book on the vocation of artists by telling the story of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 35-stanza poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” showing how the poem enabled Hopkins to say what a sermon or essay could not say about the utter awfulness of natural evil. I was helped in this regard by Margaret Ellsberg’s book, The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections from His Poems, Letters, Journals, and Spiritual Writings.

I was equally helped to tell the story of friendship amongst artists by Philip and Carol Zaleski’s book, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings. The story it tells complicates the typical stories that are told of Lewis and Tolkien. Often told as an impossibly idyllic one, it romanticize their friendship by freezing in time their most-famous moments. But it was not always easy and it didn’t end happily. Zaleski’s book tells a more-honest story.

’s delightful little book, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered, similarly tells an honest story about the work that artists make and how terribly difficult it is at times to share it with a public. As the back cover says it: “Kleon creates a user’s manual for embracing the communal nature of creativity― what he calls the ‘ecology of talent’.” It’s a fun read and it’s a good read.

Speaking of good, The T&T Clark Handbook of Theology and the Arts, edited by Stephen M. Garrett and Imogen Adkins, is so very good. As I’ve mentioned previously, this is a book that I’ve wanted my entire professional life, and while it doesn’t say everything that could be said about the field, it’s a decent introduction to theology and the arts, and an invitation to keep going.

THE BEST TV SHOWS OF 2025

Our family absolutely loved watching The Chosen Adventures. It takes two children that show up in The Chosen, Abigail and Joshua, and tells a series of smaller stories about life’s big questions, along with the help of a pigeon and a comical sheep. We laughed out loud so many times, and it tackles difficult theological questions, like the problem of evil and the understandable desire to get revenge, in ways that make sense to both children and adults.

I watched Squid Games for three reasons. Korean dramas are ridiculously good. It’s a dystopian tale, which I love. Its social commentary is sharp and bleak and prophetic. It’s not for everyone, but them that have ears to hear will hear a bit of good news, as one commentator put it: “beneath the hyper-violence, it also suggests that our obligations to other people can be a source of meaning, compassion, and—just maybe—salvation.”

Justin Willman’s Netflix special, “Magic Lover,” is neither sharp nor bleak nor prophetic. It’s hilarious and massively entertaining and magical as heck. We watched it as family and loved not knowing how he did his magic tricks. It was more fun, we figured, not to know and to be momentarily enchanted and wide-eyed than to dissect the trick and walk away disenchanted, as if this world were better off being “figured out” than “marveled at.”

Seth Rogen’s “The Studio” earned 23 nominations at this year’s Emmy Awards and it deserved every one of them. It tells the story of a fictional “legacy” Hollywood studio and it does so in a way that makes you cringe and feel sorry for artists and understand how complicated it is to make a movie and how no one person is wholly to blame for a movie’s failure or success, because it takes a freaking village to pull it off in often the messiest of ways.

“All Creatures Great and Small” is the exact opposite of “The Studio.” It’s sweet and gentle and lovely and slow-moving, and it makes you love veterinarians in a way that you never imagined you would love them. Set in the Yorkshire Dales of the 1930s and 1940s, it not only gives you a profound appreciate for the work that vets do, it also makes you want to buy a farm and to acquire all the animals you can afford in order to live a slow life that involves making loads of mistakes but also owning up to your mistakes.

THE BEST MOVIES OF 2025

“The Substance” isn’t for everyone and I won’t actually recommend you watch it, because it involves a story of body horror, and it’s grotesque in places, tragic and depressing and garish in others, but it also serves as a cautionary tale for the future of the “liquid body,” where bodies are nothing but disposable and dismissible receptacles for an allegedly “true self.”

The movie “Sinners” is a similarly difficult watch, and while I wish director and writer Ryan Coogler had written a more interesting and complicated story for the “preacherboy” and his pastor father in this film, it nonetheless weaves together black and Irish musical traditions, supernatural horror, the Jim Crow South, and crime drama in order to tell a truly mesmerizing story.

Much better in the pastor category is Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movie, “Wake Up Dead Man.” I kept expecting the one-time evangelical but now largely agnostic Johnson to give me a drunken or spineless priest, anesthetizing his parishioners with a generic Jesus or an anodyne gospel, but he didn’t, thank God. He gave us instead one of the most extraordinary stories of grace I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Speaking of surprising, I watched the biographical jukebox musical drama, “Better Man,” on a flight across the Atlantic and loved its conceit. Based on the life of the British singer, Robbie Williams, it re-presents Williams in the form of a chimpanzee all the way through to the end. This is because Williams had perceived himself early in his career as a “performing monkey.” It’s another artist story of beauty and pain, which I enjoyed very much.

THE BEST CHRISTMAS ALBUM OF 2025

My friend, Justin Ruddy, who is both a therapist and the worship leader at our church, recommended to me The Chieftains’ 1991 album, “The Bells of Dublin.” It’s one of the most interesting and endlessly pleasing Christmas albums I’ve heard in a long time. It includes appearances by the Renaissance Singers and Elvis Costello, old Irish and French carols alongside Celtic medleys, and titles such as “The Rebel Jesus” and “The Wren! The Wren!”

A happy New Year’s Eve, friends. We’ll see you in the year to come, which will mark the beginning of the end of the third decade of the twenty-first century, which is a bonkers thing to think about. Sic transit gloria mundi.

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My New Testament professor Gordon Fee once said something that sticks with me to this day. “Let me hear you sing, let me hear you pray,” he said, “and I will write your theology.” His point was that Christians, as a matter of conviction, typically set to music the things they most cherished about God.

What we cherish about God on the evidence of our Christmas carols, however, should make us wonder at best and disturb us at worst.

In carol after carol, we sing “of the Father’s love begotten” and we extol the one in whose “name all oppression shall cease.” We sing our praises, that is, of the Father and the Son but rarely of the Holy Spirit. In the second stanza of Charles Wesley’s 1744 hymn “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus,” we petition Christ’s “eternal Spirit” to rule in our hearts alone. And that’s just about it.

The Holy Spirit is breathtakingly absent from our canon of carols.

Our Christmas hymns give glory, laud, and honor to the First and Second persons of the Trinity, but we fail to give similar glory, laud, and honor to the Third Person. In doing so, we not only fail to give honor to whom honor is due; we also fail to bear faithful witness to the record of Scripture.

If our music gives evidence of what we cherish most about God, the God of our Christmas carols is binitarian, not Trinitarian.

Why is there such a stark absence of the Spirit in our repertoire of carols? How does this stand in contrast to the witness of Matthew and Luke? And what might we do about it?

That’s how I start an essay that I’ve written for Christianity Today. You can read the whole thing here: “Come, Thou Long Expected Spirit.”

In short, I suggest three reasons (historical, cultural, economic) for the Spirit’s absence in our canon of carols. I draw attention to the sharp contrast that we witness in the accounts of Matthew and Luke. In fact, for the Gospel writers, the Spirit is very much visible, not invisible, in the Nativity narratives, and an active rather than passive agent in Luke’s “account of the things” (1:1). The Spirit’s presence in the Incarnation is emphatically newsworthy.

I suggest we could either recover and repurpose ancient texts, like the fourth-century hymn, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” or the Medieval hymn, “Creator of the Stars at Night.” We could set to music a greater number of Charles Wesley’s Nativity hymns, including his “Hymn 8,” with these lines:

And while we are here,

Our King shall appear,

His Spirit impart,

And form his full image

of love in our heart.

Or we could sing new songs. Sadly, it is extraordinarily difficult to find such songs—songs that are suitable, that is, for congregational worship. If Spirit-themed songs have been written about the Nativity story, they’re usually of a devotional sort, suitable for personal or nonliturgical enjoyment.

I end the essay with an invitation to musicians to write the music that we as God’s people desperately need to sing.

Which singer-songwriters, I ask, will help us to sing of the God who chooses to use the most unlikely characters, not just the teenage Mary or the doubting Zechariah, but also tax collectors and sinners, the grafted-in Gentiles, and the one-time-violent figure of Paul?

Which worship leader will help us sing of the God who inspires prophetic speech that bears witness to the divine promise to raise the lowly, scatter the proud, fill the hungry, and extend mercy to all those who sorely need it?

And as I ask additionally in my Instagram post:

Which brave pastor will support the work of introducing such music into our practices of communal song at Christmas?

Which daring worship leader will lead the way?

Which congregation will gladly welcome rather than resist such songs, because it gladly welcomes the praise of the Holy Spirit who renews and restores us in the most astonishing and needful ways?

If pastors and worship leaders and congregations are not willing to lead the way, it won’t matter how many amazing songs our musicians create. If no one chooses to sing them, nothing will change about the deficient gospel that we proclaim in the weeks leading up to the Feast of the Nativity.

Please do share this essay, if you would, with your pastor, worship leader, and musician friends, because it’ll take a village to change a tradition that we have come to regard as perfectly normal, when it is anything but normal according to the witness of the saints. We can do better, friends. We need to do better.

And we can raise our voices for now with the words of the ancient hymn:

Christ! to thee with God the Father,

And O Holy Ghost, to thee,

Hymn and chant and high thanksgiving

And unwearied praises be,

Honor, glory, and dominion,

And eternal victory—

Evermore and evermore.

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I once lived in a neighborhood where the pecan trees rose a hundred feet high into the burning Texas sky. With two in the backyard and one in the front, they towered over our home with a kind of regal elegance.

In 2005, they turned strange, however. All summer long, they began losing limbs, in some instances at a wild, feverish pace. Thick, scaly branches ripped away, cracking the air with a screeching sound, then plummeted noiselessly to the ground. All down my block, branches crashed on top of cars and roofs and lawns, yielding a great whine of chainsaws.

Good things that should have been strong and enduring were falling apart.

Much the same can be said about this past year: marriages broken by infidelity; families torn apart by political animosities; congregations damaged and then fractured by the abuse of authority; landscapes ravaged by fires; cities roiled by cycles of protest and counterprotest, some of them turning brutally violent. Things keep breaking down to this day.

Seeing so many things break down in the world around us can cause even the sturdiest among us to begin to lose it. We lose hope. We lose perspective. We lose the will to care. When left to our own devices, a dark despair begins to settle in and corrode our sense of what’s real and good and worth the while.

This is where the words of the prophet Isaiah speak to us across the centuries to convey a word of hope. “Hold on, dear pilgrim,” he tells us. “Hold on.” Then the Lord speaks in Isaiah 35:3–4:

Strengthen the feeble hands,

steady the knees that give way;

say to those with fearful hearts,

“Be strong, do not fear.”

Blind, deaf, lame, and mute—of both body and heart—will be made whole. Wastelands will blossom. The hot sands will become a cool oasis. Wrongs will be made right, and the redeemed will return home dancing with halos of everlasting joy. It will not always be dark and dreadful.

When things in our lives and the world around us keep falling apart, in ways that might seem utterly pointless or downright merciless, it is easy to lose hope. And when we lose hope, the world can feel terribly bleak and not worth bothering over.

God knows our hearts need help in such times. He knows our hands will grow weak and our hearts fearful. He knows we’ll want to give up, even if only in small ways. So, it is to us, here and now, that he speaks a word of promise:

Gladness and joy will overtake [you],

and sorrow and sighing will flee away. (v. 10)

We lost one of the pecan trees at our old Austin home, and the two that remained looked haggard and spindly. I imagine many of us feel similarly today. We feel worn down by all the things that keep breaking down. But to each of us, our Lord speaks:

“Be strong, and do not be afraid.

I am coming.

I am coming and will set all things right.”

“I don’t ever want to stop growing, being creative. Even death, inevitable as it is, will be just one more creative spurt into the future, one more growing edge, one more leap into the light. Remember, we don’t die into death. We die into life!”

– Luci Shaw, Breath for the Bones

Luci Shaw has permanently changed addresses, as my grandpa liked to call the experience of death. She died on December 1, 2025, at the age of 96. I grieve her passing, not simply because I will miss her terribly but because she represents yet another elder in the art & faith movement that has dearly departed, along with folks like Andraé Crouch, Frederick Buechner, Phyllis Tickle, Calvin Seerveld, Madeleine L’Engle, and Walter Wangerin Jr.

Death comes for us all, I know, and it is supposed to have lost its sting for those who believe in the resurrected Christ, and, yes, “Death has been utterly extinguished as we enter, and join, the Quickening,” as Luci puts it in one of her last poems in Reversing Entropy, but still. It hurts. It hurts in that hidden place in your heart, where you feel most exposed and things hurt most painfully, to see the people you love leave you so irrevocably.

And yet as we must always remember our own inevitable death (in the practice of memento mori), so we must remember with gratitude the lives of those who have received their eternal reward.

I first met the Luci Shaw at a Cèilidh dance thirty years ago this fall.

A first-year graduate student at Regent College, in Vancouver, British Columbia, I’d joined the entire school at a camp just south of the Canadian border. The highpoint of the all-school retreat was a Scottish folk dance that took place on a Saturday night.

Like many of my generation, I had been a fan of Luci’s poetry and fanboyed over her presence. She’d been friends with Madeleine L’Engle, she’d served as a charter member of the Chrysostom Society (which happened to take a retreat at Laity Lodge at the same time I took one with a group of artists from our home church), which included a who’s who of writers of faith, and she’d bungee-jumped in her seventies. What was not to love about this woman?

I plucked up the courage and asked if she’d pair up with me for one of the dances. She said yes. She was always game, it seemed, for an adventure. (The title to her 2005 book, The Crime of Living Cautiously: Hearing God’s Call to Adventure, tells us as much.) We whirled around the room, sweating and laughing, with me desperately not trying to step on her toes. Despite her age (67 years old at the time) and her obvious limp, she danced with a child’s heart.

Nine years later, in the fall of 2004, as a pastor in Austin, I invited her to fly down from her hometown of Bellingham, Washington, in order to lead a seminar for writers at the annual arts festival that we hosted at our church, Hope Chapel. She also did a public reading of her poetry and she partnered with me on my sermon that Sunday.

A few weeks later, I emailed to ask if she might contribute to a book that I had hoped to edit, featuring the advice of our elder statesmen and women in the art and faith movement. Each person would answer the same question: What wisdom might you offer to the next generation of artists of faith?

My hope with the book was to encourage younger artists who faced their own unique challenges and opportunities in the early twenty-first century. The project sadly never got off the ground but there was one artist who did answer my query: Luci Shaw, who in the spring of 2024, at the tender age of 96, would publish her sixteenth volume of poetry, The Generosity.

Luci’s words of wisdom to younger believer artists were as follows, which I have included in my forthcoming book, To Set the World Aflame:

1. Look to our Creator as the great exemplar of fresh, original, innovative creativity.

2. Study your craft. Polish your work. Avoid any kind of carelessness or sloppiness.

3. Be an artist who happens to be a Christian, not a Christian who tries to do art.

4. Fear not. Don’t let anxiety about your work paralyze you. If God has called you to be an artist, he will enable that, along with your own dedicated cooperation.

5. Give your imagination lots to feed on. Create a rich, immediate, usable past.

6. Free your envisioning and thinking from cliché. Reflect the surprise of revelation.

What I love about her advice is how holistic it is. She attends not just to the spiritual needs of artists but also to their practical and creative needs. She begins with God and she ends with the world. She assumes the goodness of ambition but not to self-absorbed ends. She argues for virtue, alongside all the great Medieval writers, and, on the testimony of her life and work, she practices what she preaches, including a commitment to community.

I love also how she articulates the task of the artist in the opening lines to her poem, “Take These Words”:

To be a poet you must write

more than you know, hoping it to be true,

that the words will have a life beyond the moment,

taking the shape of their meaning, like rain

filling a bowl—drops gathering into a fullness

that is wholly fresh and drinkable.

Art that is wholly fresh and drinkable. That’s what I titled the chapter in my book with Brazos Press that includes these words. It’s such a beautiful image.

In the foreword that she wrote to the book that I edited for Baker Books in 2010, For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, Luci says this:

“Beauty is always available. It is there to be attended to, and art is our human response to whatever we see as beautiful. Not the kind of beauty we might call pretty, or decorative—it can be strong, shocking, confusing, boundary-breaking, thrusting forward in experimental ways, but most often reflecting glory, the glory of our God who created us with the capacity for recognizing, responding and receiving beauty through the work of artists.

This role of the arts has not always been received kindly in Christian churches. Often art has been seen as too experimental, too self-indulgent and too disturbing to be recognized as a gift of Grace. Perhaps this was one of the disjunctions David Taylor had in mind when he called together pastors and artists to Austin in the magnificent symposium, Transforming Culture. Face to face, ear to ear, heart to heart, these individuals acknowledged their need for each other and discovered fresh ways to connect and integrate.”

This excerpt captures the unique quality of Luci’s voice, which you can hear all throughout her spiritual writings. You hear it, for example, in Breath for the Bones: Art, imagination, and Spirit, and in Thumbprint in the Clay: Divine Marks of Beauty, Order and Grace. It is a kind, feisty, lyrical, simple voice. She was very much her voice.

Luci was kind. I saw her always be kind and encouraging to the fledgling poets within our community of artists in Austin. (Her advice to young poets, I might add, is advice that all artists would do well to heed: avoid “poetic language” and “dreamy generalizations.”) I observed her unfailing patience with those who felt intimidated by poetry and even more so by poets.

Because Luci was at home in her own skin, she was able to be fully present to others, in their own skin. She never patronized her listeners, never condescended to the ignorant, and never (or most never) wished she were elsewhere when engaged in conversation with amateur artists. Every time that Phaedra and I enjoyed her company, she was fully present. This cannot regrettably be said for all famous or non-famous artists.

Luci was feisty. While she had no patience for the faith-shrinking clichés and sentimentalism that marked much of American evangelicalism, she was never mean-spirited with the members of her ecclesial family. But she was plenty fearless. Betsy Sholl, the Poet Laureate of Maine, describes Luci’s poetry as “holy mischief.” That it was. For Luci, faith was like the wrestling of a trout on the line, the struggle “to land this flailing, feral thing–all thrash and edge.”

“Impatience consumes me,” she confessed in her poem, “New Leaf Restaurant,” and I imagine that her impatience was difficult at times for members of her immediate family. In Adventure of Ascent, she writes: “The trouble with aging is that there’s really no remedy. In the end, no one survives it.” Luci refused to look away from death, or doubt, or depression.

Luci was lyrical. Like her contemporary, Eugene Peterson, who I imagine rejoiced to welcome her into glory this past Monday, Luci’s writing has a musical quality to it that gives evidence of her love for the sonorous textures of language—for rhyme, meter, rhythm, consonance. Luci’s entire life’s work, one might say, represents an exercise in paying attention to the music of God’s creation.

Like Keats and Dickinson before her, Luci was a (sacramental) poet of nature. As evidenced in collections such as Listen to the Green and The Green Earth, she delighted in the details of the physical world: the fossilized coral, the pink-breasted house finch, the humid rot, the slow growth of lichens.

Luci was simple. I say this as a compliment, not as an unfortunate thing. It is easy to be cynical and it takes no effort to be deadly serious. Luci was neither, thank God. The Penn State professor and poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf calls Luci the “master of the deceptively simple lyric.” Luci aimed always to write in accessible ways, which is far more difficult than one might imagine. Unlike T. S. Eliot’s dense language or Scott Cairns’ often-polysyllabic, barnacle-like language, Luci’s language is simple and direct.

If I’m honest, it is for this reason, perhaps, that I like but do not love her nonfiction writing. I prefer Kathleen Norris and Frederick Buechner over Luci’s ruminations on the art of faith, and would reach first for a book of her religious poetry (such as Accompanied by Angels) rather than nature poetry.

But that small reservation aside, I loved Luci for so many reasons.

I loved the way that she embraced the role of mother to many younger artists. I loved how she invested in poets and musicians and dancers and plenty more besides. I loved her cheeky ways. I loved the way she laughed at funny things with her whole face. I loved the emails she’d send to her friends around Christmas time with a new poem she’d just written.

I loved that she felt free to ask me to look out for her grand-daughter artist at a conference I was to attend. I loved how sweetly she talked about her husband, John. I loved the way she kept writing poems until the very end, in ways that were often brutally honest, as she does in this poem that she wrote in the aftermath of her brother’s death, “The Sift of Grief”:

How granular are grief and sorrow, arriving

in the particularities of distress, like sharp

pebbles in your show. How cunning and intricate,

as a species of panic ensues, bearing down the hours.

Impossible to ignore.

In the long night, grievances multiply.

Disappointment, doubt, and regret bludgeon the soul.

Your best dreams show up bruised, your hopes ragged.

Yet look—from the skylight the room fills with soft

early sun, its fine motes, welcome, reliable. They sift

across the bed, blessing your dead, peaceful face.

On October 28 of this year, I received an email from her, letting me, along with her village of friends, know that, come November 4, she and John would be moving into an assisted living community. She ended the email by saying: “Once we are settled, we’d love to see you and show you our new living arrangements.”

On November 17, I wrote her back to ask permission to use one of her poems in my book. I told her I was happy-sad to hear the news that they’d have to leave their home in Bellingham. I told her that Phaedra had passed along her warmest greetings. And I told her that I had hope she might be able to endorse one last book of mine, as she had three books previously.

I never heard back from Luci.

Today I grieve her absence in this earthly plane. I try to be happy for her, now that she has seen her Maker face to face, but mostly I’m feeling sorry for myself. I know this isn’t an admirable way to respond but I’d like to believe that Luci is ok with me feeling sorry for myself, because she is feeling none of these things and she might even recall Dumbledore’s words to Harry Potter at the end of The Deathly Hallows: “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living.”

Sweet Luci, pity me, and pity us all.

I end here with a prayer that I have written “For Gratitude in the Death of a Beloved One” from my book with Phaedra, Prayers for the Pilgrimage. It expresses how I feel about Luci, whom we will miss awfully much.

O Lord, you who wept over the death of your beloved friend Lazarus, we too weep over the death of our beloved friend Luci Shaw. We weep over all that has been lost: her touch, her voice, her presence, what she would have made of the world that you so love had she lived longer, all that she called out in each of us, and all the beauty that shone through her.

As she is now far from us, be near to us, we pray. Be our comfort in this time of grief, even as we seek to be a comfort one to another, so that we might be those whom you call blessed because they mourn. We pray this in the name of our Bright Morning Star, Jesus himself. Amen.

I’ll let Luci have the last word on this memoriam, from her poem, “God’s Loaf.” It is a good word:

“We are not all called

as prophets, yet at the altar

with our hungry mouths we may

receive him in the form

of yeast-risen bread

reminding us that Jesus rose

to new life from the dead.”