Art & Culture Lists

Mar 15, 2023 | Patrons Blog | 0 comments

Reading & Content Lists on Art and Culture

—by Kirk Irwin

READING

This is far from a complete list. I’ve placed them in a relatively sequential order. You don’t have to read them in this order but there is a progression in the literature with various fiction interspersed throughout.

Primers

Finding Common Ground —Tim Downs

Plowing in Hope: Toward a Biblical Theology of Culture —David Bruce Hegeman

Art and the Bible —Francis Schaeffer

The Mind of the Maker —Dorothy Sayers

Modern Art and the Death of a Culture —Hans Rookmaaker

Questioning Evangelism —Randy Newman

Objects of Grace; Conversations on Creativity and Faith —James Romaine

Can Poetry Matter? —Dana Gioia

The Strangest Way —Robert Barron

It Was Good, Making Art to the Glory of God, Ned Bustard – editor

Evangelism Outside the Box —Rick Richardson

The Shoes of Van Gogh & Van Gogh and God —Cliff Edwards

Celtic Way of Evangelism by George Hunter

Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura

From the Garden to the City by Jon Dyer

Apologetics and the Christian Imagination by Holly Ordway

What is Art? —Leo Tolstoy

On The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art by James Elkins

From the Garden to the City by John Dyer

Intermediate

A Profound Weakness: Christians & Kitsch —Betty Spackman

On Beauty and Being Just —Elaine Scarry

The God Who is There —Francis Schaeffer

He is There and He is Not Silent —Francis Schaeffer

Who’s Afraid of Modern Art by Daniel Siedell

Advanced

Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art, and Rhetoric —Richard Viladesau

Voicing Creation’s Praise: Toward a Theology of the Arts —Jeremy Begbie

Re-Enchantment edited by James Elkins

The Complete Works of HR Rookmaaker, edited by Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker

Fiction

Wiseblood, & A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Short Stories, —Flannery O’Connor

Sick Heart River, —John Buchan (any of the novels by Buchan are good)

Gilead, —Marilynne Robinson

Daniel Nayeri

Anything by CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Owen Barfield, or Charles Williams

Poets

1. Micheal O’Siadhail (Pronounced “Me-hole O-Sheel”)

2. Malcolm Guite – anything by Malcolm is quite good. He is on YouTube. I found out about him through his lectures on the Inklings which he did ten years ago: a. https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/the-inklings-fantasists-or-prophets-the-complete-set/

3. Maurice Manning

4. Charles Wright

5. Wendell Berry

6. TS Eliot

7. William Blake

8. Seamus Heaney

9. Interrogations at Noon, Daily Horoscope & The Gods of Winter—Dana Gioia