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Katie Kresser

Blog

Sanctuary

Professional art historians are among the luckiest of God’s children. Our vocations consist in the study and praise of beautiful things. If we are fortunate to have an academic job, we can use the summer months to travel and discover even more beauty - and count this useful, as well! So it was that I…
Katie Kresser
July 1, 2021
Blog

Obscurity: On Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (usually just called Caravaggio) was always hiding. He left his family home at age 13, an orphan hiding from sorrow. At 21 he wounded a police officer and fled his hometown of Milan, hiding from the law. In his twenties and early thirties he spent most of his time skulking in…
Katie Kresser
April 29, 2021
Blog

Forsaken: On Good Friday

On this day, we remember the unjust murder of an innocent man. And he wasn’t innocent in just a legal way, or even a “religious commandment” sort of way. He was innocent in a child way, an infant way.  Though a grown man, with a man’s strength and a great scholar’s mind (of course he…
Katie Kresser
April 2, 2021
Blog

For Palm Sunday: Pushing Through Crowds

We know ourselves by what is reflected back at us. We see ourselves in the reactions, labels and facial expressions of others. In fact (oh, what danger!) this is primarily how we know ourselves. In a very real sense, we are always naked and helpless before others’ eyes. We depend on them for meaning, for…
Katie Kresser
March 26, 2021
Blog

Armor, literal and figurative: On Pontius Pilate and the Artist Raphael

In 1505, the Renaissance artist Raphael Sanzio lavished his skill on a subject rather out-of-date: the legendary dragon slayer St. George, an early Christian saint generally associated with the martial and chivalric spirit of the Crusades. In his large painting of the subject at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the holy warrior…
Katie Kresser
March 15, 2021
Blog

For Ash Wednesday: On Clean Pain

It’s Ash Wednesday, a time of repentance, and I’m put in mind of an artist of sorrow. Rogier van der Weyden, a 15th-century Netherlandish genius, was known for many things (including an audacious portrait of himself as a saint), See https://collections.mfa.org/objects/31035  but his paintings of Christ’s death are his most profound. They are almost unrivaled…
Katie Kresser
February 17, 2021
Blog

Bodies, Beauty and Time: On Michelangelo

Contemporary culture is obsessed with the human body. It (that is, the body) carries so much responsibility. Weak, mortal, finite, it is made to bear burdens of eternity: it is made to be a sign of dignity, meaning and status that is somehow eternal. So, we punish it, whipping it into shape with brutal exercises.…
Katie Kresser
February 10, 2021
Blog

Luxuriant (at Christmastime)

In gray Seattle, it’s easy to feel a sense of mystery as you walk the streets. The clouds hide the sun, and the wind rushes (sometimes), as if hiding secret voices. The mystery is only greater now, as people walk silent and masked, faces veiled, paths parallel and never approaching. Each one is a rook,…
Katie Kresser
December 21, 2020
Blog

More Than (Art and Orthodoxy)

In the early centuries after Christ, myriad heresies peeled free of the doctrinal core, curling attractively, then blanching and withering. They were like eddies swirling off a current, spiraling prettily and then dissipating. Or like whorls of smoke from a pipe. Such things were attractive precisely in their divergence from the core. They were Life…
Katie Kresser
December 7, 2020
Blog

On The Holy, In Autumn

Recently, I visited a Japanese garden with my students. It was a good way to socially distance while enjoying some embodied, face-to-face experience with each other. Mostly, we talked about Japanese garden design: for example, how it integrates Buddhist and Shinto architectural elements, how it highlights precious natural objects (such as exceptional trees or rocks),…
Katie Kresser
November 9, 2020
Blog

On Museums and Monsters: Defining Art

What is art? I have my students answer this question every autumn, and every autumn I get a host of new answers. That’s because “art” is, and always has been, notoriously hard to define. Sometimes students’ answers revolve around the effects of art: “art is something that moves you in a certain way,” they might…
Katie Kresser
October 12, 2020
Blog

Teaching Culture in Covidtide

A new school year is beginning, and I’m thinking about how to teach cultural history.  There are a lot of reasons to get “meta” right now, as a cultural historian. (Specifically, I’m a professor of Art History and Visual Studies.) First, there’s mode of delivery, and the cultural implications of that. If “the medium is the…
Katie Kresser
September 2, 2020
Review Essays

Art and Theology—A Review Essay

Katie Kresser is Associate Professor of Art History at Seattle Pacific University. This essay treats three recent works on the subject of art and theology, ranging from a simple handbook of Christian symbols (Judith Couchman’s Art of Faith) to a dense and learned discussion of postmodern art and philosophy (Richard Viladesau’s Theological Aesthetics). The wholly…
Katie Kresser
October 15, 2013
Reviews

Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art.

Reviewed by Katie Kresser, Department of Art, Seattle Pacific University The title Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art is tantalizing. The subtitle, in particular, makes mental wheels turn. What does T. J. Gorringe mean by the “challenges of art”? Is he suggesting that “art” might be a worthy rival to theology – might…
Katie Kresser
July 15, 2012
Reviews

Space, Time and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God

A significant disadvantage attending the hyper-specialized, professionalized nature of so much academic production today is the absence of synthesis. Scholars in diverse fields often treat similar issues (concerning things like identity, society, and the nature of truth)—but from different vantage points and with different vocabularies. They seldom see that they are duplicating each other’s efforts,…
Katie Kresser
July 15, 2011
Reviews

The Sacred Body: Asceticism in Religion, Literature, Art and Culture

The title of David Jasper ’s new book, The Sacred Body: Asceticism in Religion, Literature, Art and Culture, promises a survey of the topic of asceticism in art and literature. More enticingly, it promises the reader that she will embark on a historical pattern-finding mission with the author. (What is this “sacred body”? What is…
Katie Kresser
April 15, 2010