My Academic Sabbatical: A Book Project

“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.” – Susan Sontag (from a 1992 interview with Leslie Garis)

“Art, by its very nature, is a question. A question about who we are, about what things matter.” — Jeannette Winterson

Today I officially begin my academic sabbatical. In contrast to typical pastoral sabbaticals, mine won’t involve a break from work but rather a reorienting of it. Instead of teaching and running committees, I’ll spend all of my time writing. I’ll be writing a book that I’ve wanted to write for over a quarter of a century, when I first began ministering to artists, in 1996..

I’ll be writing a book on the vocation of an artist.

It’ll include a review of western history’s construal of an artist in conversation with typically eastern understandings, neither of which have been anywhere near uniform.

It’ll investigate the trinitarian contours of an artist’s work: how a Patrology underwrites an indispensable theology of creation and culture, how a Christology makes space for imagination, sacramentality and mystery, and how a Pneumatology funds both tradition & innovation, form & freedom, order & serendipity.

It’ll look closely at not just what the Bible states explicitly about artistic and aesthetic matters but also, more crucially, what it assumes about such things.

It’ll argue that the unique calling of artists is to bring the rest of us into an intentional and intensive experience of the aesthetic aspect of our humanity.

It’ll attend carefully to contemporary voices on the arts—from Pope John Paul II to Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, William Deresiewicz to Misty Copeland, from Octavia Butler to Lambert Zuidervaart, from Rachel Marie Kang and Marilynne Robinson, and more.

It’ll explore the habits of artists, like the kind that we find in Mason Currey’s book, “Daily Rituals,” and it’ll show how fictional representations of artists, such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s “An Artist of the Floating World,” or Emily St. John Mandel, “Station Eleven,” or Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life,” enable us to see how such representations both express and re-interpret prevailing assumptions about the life of an artist well lived.

It’ll propose a register of virtues and practices that would enable an artist to flourish, no matter their station or condition of life.

And it’ll outline the missional implications of an artist whose imagination has been captured by the heart of Christ himself.

I’m excited to begin this writing project and will be sharing progress reports here as I go along.

Phaedra hard at work on the miniature watercolor paintings for our joint prayerbook project.