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.

What good are the arts ?

I note an interesting debate on Radio 3's Night Waves on the history of understandings of what the arts are capable of achieving; a debate that can't entirely avoid the religious nature of that claim until at least the nineteenth century, and arguably beyond. Participants included John Carey, Edith Hall and Jude Kelly. It's available on the iPlayer service.

Another 'Catholic novel'

What could be more Catholic than a novel set in Lourdes ? Such is Michael Arditti's latest, Jubilate, which is reviewed in the Telegraph, the Independent, and by Peter Stanford in the Guardian

Donald Bernard

The importance of gospel in the development of post-war Christian popular music for worship has occasionally been remarked upon, but seldom documented. In this connection I notice an obituary of Donald Bernard, founding pastor of the first congregation of the New Testament Assembly in 1961; read it in the Guardian.

Romantic Moderns

I note several reviews of this recent book by Alexandra Harris: amongst others, Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian, Simon Heffer in the Spectator and Boyd Tonkin in the Independent.

I've yet to read the book, but her tracing of another strand to the usual 'conservative English/modernist continentals' opposition is of some importance in relation to what some within the churches were attempting at the time. The murals at Berwick,, associated with George Bell, are explicitly mentioned by Daisy Hay.

Harris is on the English staff at the University of Liverpool.

Anglo-Catholicism, theology and the arts, 1918-70

In 2008 I gave a lecture to the Anglo-Catholic History Society on this topic. Having not published it elsewhere in the meantime, it is now available in SAS-Space. It ventures a parallel interpretation of the trajectories of church engagement with music, religious drama and the visual arts; and of the place of the arts in understandings of the relationship between Christianity and British culture. Read it in SAS-Space.