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Grounded: God in the Dirt

Starting around the year 1400, a new kind of Nativity Scene began to grace European art – and Italian Renaissance art, particularly. Before, Nativity scenes often featured Mary holding a swaddled baby Jesus and surrounded by animals and worshippers in a stable. The new formula, however, showed the baby Jesus lying naked on the ground,…
Katie Kresser
December 17, 2024
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When Judgment Hurts

Last month, I attended a conference at Calvin University focused on how to counter reductionism in teaching and education. Certainly, our culture has been in thrall to reductionist tendencies for some time, as the angry, dismissive tone of internet culture and political discourse shows us. Sadly, this tone often makes its way into the classroom,…
Katie Kresser
November 18, 2024
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An Extended Review of The Artistic Sphere: The Arts in Neo-­Calvinist Perspective (Part 2)

The words of Calvinists like Kuyper on the one hand, and secular “formalists” like Greenberg on the other, can sometimes seem interchangeable. However, Kuyper and Greenberg would certainly have disagreed concerning the “area of competence” contained in the “Artistic Sphere.” For Kuyper (and for Rookmaaker, who worked out Kuyper’s ideas through art criticism) the artist…
Katie Kresser
November 14, 2024
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Hard To Look At (The Brazen Serpent)

The sun beats down and the head swims. Lips are parched. Eyes see spots. Legs list and stagger, barely able to hold up the body’s weight. Everything seems both too bright and too dark at the same time. The heart cries out with a silent scream, “I hate you, I hate you, God of my…
Katie Kresser
October 28, 2024
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Who are you trying to impress?

I think human beings are built to want to impress someone. To please someone. To get approval. It’s there, palpably, in everyone’s eyes, if you know how to look. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this - nothing at all. It’s built into the tripartite structure of the Trinity, wherein Father and Son gaze upon each…
Katie Kresser
September 10, 2024
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Fully Seen, Fully Known

Recently I walked with students among the self-portrait collection at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Most of these portraits were glamorous and proud, but a few were melancholy, desperate, even brutal. Some were fanciful, others despairing. Almost all faced outward as if to catch the eyes of passers-by and elicit recognition, acknowledgment, and sympathy.…
Katie Kresser
July 15, 2024
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Scapegoating: Baby Steps at the Dead Sea

Sometime in your life, you have been a scapegoat. At some point in your life, you have been at the bottom of a pecking order, or at least very near to it, and you have felt ashamed and afraid. It’s likely that this experience morally compromised you. Maybe you lied to protect yourself. Maybe you…
Katie Kresser
June 10, 2024
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On Going to Church: Mimesis and Magnificence

Recently, thanks to a collaboration with fellow CCCU school Gordon College, I was able to spend a month in Italy teaching art history to a wonderful group of Christian students. This was, of course, a priceless opportunity for an art historian. Italy abounds in stellar museums and archaeological sites, and over the years, I have…
Katie Kresser
May 21, 2024
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The Convergence Point

How do two utterly dissimilar things come together? How can they be reconciled? By rising. As the phrase goes, attributed to the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and popularized by the novelist Flanner O’Connor, “everything that rises must converge.” And it converges upon a lofty, shared Object, the source and end of our desire,…
Katie Kresser
April 16, 2024
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Healing the Imagination: The Crucifix as Medicine

I am an art historian by trade, and recently, I had the opportunity to deliver an art history lecture at my church. I always relish these occasions, because they give me a chance to share my passion with a wider audience. They also, maybe surprisingly, help me with my own research. I’m deeply interested in…
Katie Kresser
March 19, 2024
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Holy Grails and Trendy Water Bottles: On Desire

This year, at my daughter’s suburban, mostly upper-income middle school, a certain kind of water bottle has become au courant. It is expensive and unwieldy, but there’s a sense that one can’t do without it. I found out today that another, nearby middle school (no surprise) is aflutter about the same bottle. To be deprived…
Katie Kresser
February 13, 2024
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Rituals and Gestures: At the New Year

I am an Art Historian. And one way of making a “history” of art is to trace a history of gesture. The Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman summed this up in his 1947 manifesto, The First Man Was an Artist.This essay was first published in the art magazine Tiger’s Eye (1947, issue 1) and can…
Katie Kresser
January 25, 2024
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Do Not Be Afraid

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.” - Luke 2:10 Beneath the dissonant, thrumming symphony of contemporary culture, I think the creeping bass line is fear. I’m not sure if this was true a few years ago, but…
Katie Kresser
December 15, 2023
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Bootstrapping

In the modern world, youth culture, and especially collegiate culture, is often activist culture. Among the college-aged, a freshness of vision combines with just enough personal skill and knowledge to beget (at least sometimes) a burning sense of responsibility. One phrase associated with collegiate protest culture, and with social activism in general, is “be the…
Katie Kresser
November 6, 2023
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The Hell Dynamic

Lately, I have been especially attentive to outbreaks, like a rash, of what I call to myself the “Hell dynamic.” It is a spirit of domination and destruction, in that order. It begins with a struggle for power, exerted with greater or lesser straightforwardness. (This is “domination.”) It ends with a reckoning full of blame and…
Katie Kresser
October 9, 2023
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Society of the Spectacle

Every year in my Contemporary Art class, I guide my students through a 1960s manifesto called Society of the Spectacle. Written by the angsty, art-adjacent theorist Guy Debord, it captures the philosophical energies informing contemporary fine art in a pithy and memorable way. Debord’s central thesis (informed by Marxist thought) is this: that modern society…
Katie Kresser
September 20, 2023
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Spiritual Murder 

The world is full of recrimination nowadays. There’s the online marketplace of terror, for one thing: doxxing, death threats, so-called “cancelling,” and just plain old ad hominem bomb throwing. There is the bloodthirsty tribalism that casts one’s opponent as an existential (and almost inhuman) enemy. And there is always, in abundance, that quiet world of “bitching…
Katie Kresser
August 2, 2023
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