Blog closed

With many thanks to all those who have read and commented over the past few years, I've taken the decision to close this blog. All posts have now been migrated to http://peterwebster.wordpress.com where I shall continue to blog about the relationship of theology and the arts in Britain, but much more besides.

The visual arts in the Church of England, 1935-56

I'm very pleased to be able to say that my article for Studies in Church History 44 (2008) on this topic is now available online in SAS-Space. It tried to catch some of the energy of a small group of critics, artists and clergy who saw a need for renewal in religous art, and thought they knew how to make it happen. Reading it again, five years after first beginning to write it, I'm still quite pleased with it (which one doesn't always find.) As well as my regular subjects George Bell and Walter Hussey, there are appearances for Henry Moore, John Betjeman and Kenneth Clark, amongst others.

A new life of Pevsner

This blog can't really ignore a new biography of Pevsner by Susie Harries: a figure both peripheral to its central concern, but to be found everywhere in the background. Reviews have appeared in most of the papers, including the Guardian and by Frances Spalding in the Independent. There is also an extended piece in the TLS by Stefan Collini which doesn't seem to be online as yet.

Puritanism and the ethics of representation

A happy juxtaposition of two reviews in the same day. Roger Scruton reviews Martin Kemp's From Christ to Coke in Prospect. Not available online is David Hawkes' review article 'Signs of Grace', looking at four new books on the Puritans (TLS, Sept 2).
They are both interesting in different ways on the nature of the 20th century's relationship with the visual image, and both engage with the idea of iconoclasm. For Hawkes, Puritanism is at base an 'ethics of representation', opposing an idolatrous fixation on appearances and a spiritually fatal neglect of underlying essences. The Puritans are worth studying for the critique they would likely have made of contemporary culture on these grounds; and there are overtones of such a critique in Scruton's piece.

James Wood on the New Atheism

James Wood has been one of the most consistently interesting critics writing about religious themes in contemporary fiction, and I note another very useful essay in the Guardian Saturday Review.

The Compassion Teepee

Interesting report in the Observer about an art installation in Liverpool, in which the public can leave messages, including many relating to the recent riots. What is most interesting is where it is: in the bombed church of St Luke, destroyed in 1941 and now in the hands of the city council. The church seems to function as an unofficial war memorial, and has a memorial to the victims of the Irish famine in the grounds. I'm interested that a site of memory should be used for the current installation. See the church website for more; on bombed churches in general, see my article on the subject

How to memorialise 9/11 ?

Interesting article of a few weeks back from Rowan Moore, the Observer's architecture critic, on what it is that is being built at Ground Zero. Although Moore doesn't address the issue directly, there are many artistic assumptions that have to be made if a memorial is to be intelligible; and I wonder how easy that is, in a time of very limited consensus on 'national' art forms and styles.

Church music and evangelical identity

I'm very pleased to be able to say that Ian Jones' and my article on 'pop' church music and Anglican evangelical identity since 1958 is now live in SAS-Space. It was first published in Mark Smith's edited volume British Evangelical Identities: volume 1 (Paternoster, 2008), which also includes a splendid piece from John Harvey on evangelical material culture.

New miracle plays

I note with interest a series of contemporary interpretations of the themes of the medieval miracle plays, all this week on Radio 3. Last night it was on the Creation; still to come, the Flood, the Exodus, David and Goliath and Samson and Delilah.

The Rainbow

I note an interesting essay by Rachel Cusk on D.H. Lawrence's Women and Love and The Rainbow, around the same time as the BBC were screening an adaptation of the two novels. I'm fairly sure that religious historians are not at all finished with Lawrence's curious religion of the sensual, and his treatment of 'religious' characters.