New Book Contract: “On the Vocation of Artists”!
I’m super excited to sign a contract with Brazos Press in order to write a book that I’ve wanted to write for years, provisionally titled:
To Set the World Aflame: Reflections on the Vocation of an Artist.
Drawing on 30 years of pastoral and scholarly work with artists, from Bono to Luci Shaw, and from Thailand to South Africa, the book aims to offer readers a vision for the vocation of an artist that takes advantage of biblical, theological, historical, pastoral and missional resources.
Both comprehensive in scope and attentive to the particular challenges and opportunities of artists across the globe, it argues that an artist’s calling is to deal both intentionally and intensively with the aesthetic aspect of our human lives and thereby to infuse it with a unique vibrancy and invest it with fresh meaning.
More specifically, the vocation of an artist is to be a caretaker of the imagination, a custodian of the emotions, a steward of physical reality and a creator of life-giving metaphors that serve the common good and that bear visible witness to creation as the theater of God’s grace, burning bright with the life of the Triune God.
In doing so, artists and all that they make—from illustrated manuscripts to moving pictures, from works of literary fiction to Zen gardens, from graffiti art to gothic cathedrals—enable the rest of us to enter into the fullness of God’s creative and recreative purposes for our world.
Divided into five sections—Beginnings, Aesthetics, Bible, Theology, Spiritual Formation, and Mission—the book explores topics such as:
“From Artisan to Creative Entrepreneur”
“A Babel of Opinions”
“On Incarnation and Imagination”
“An Insight is Not a Muscle”
“The Aesthetic Shape of Scripture”
“Posters that Care”
Similar to my book on the psalms, finally, this book draws both on my work as an academic, specifically with a course that I ‘ve taught Fuller Seminary for the past ten years, and on my work as a full-time pastor for ten years in Austin, Texas, in order to offer readers a winsome and persuasive treatment of the vocation of artists.
Due in bookstores the fall of 2026!
Go, fight, win!
Or, more contextually: Read, Write, Rinse, Repeat!
(PS: This bookshelf is one of my favorite in my office and I'm so looking forward to re-reading these materials as I write each chapter of the book.)
