Firstly: "In Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations, Canadian poet John Terpstra creates a singular apologetic of churchgoing. In a series of short personal meditations (sometimes one page, sometimes one sentence), Terpstra pieces together a mosaic of observations on his life as a churchgoer and the stubbornness of faith. Unlike many who write about the church, Terpstra is not interested in being right: “I have heard everything there is to say about this place, for and against; both its necessity and its redundancy. Have felt it all, in my bones.” But even if Terpstra has heard it all, he has shared something new with the rest of us in Skin Boat, which combines plain speech about the perplexities and delights of churchgoing with invigorating metaphor and an intuitive narrative order. Anchored by stories from the lives of St. Cuthbert and St. Brendan, Terpstra’s meditations range from the briefest epiphanies (“I have thought: perhaps perfection is not required.”) to complex stories that rise from within his church community: a brain surgery undergone by their pastor, and the echoes of a painful scandal that still reverberate through the congregation."
Read Image's web exclusive interview with Terpstra and learn more about his writing process here.
In the light of the Mayborn Museum at Baylor University currently housing two of the greatest masterpieces of modern religious art (Georges Rouault's Miserere and Marc Chagall's Bible series) they have this to say:
"Operating both in and out of the mainstreams of modernist art, these artists manage to retrieve and re-articulate for our time perennial human questions and responses. Rather than produce art that glorifies sensual experience as an end in itself, like the Pre-Raphaelites of the nineteenth century, or that demolishes the image of man in cynical eruptions of the diabolical, like many post-World War I art movements, Rouault (1871-1958) and Chagall (1887-1985) sought to probe the innermost reality of man and the world, interpreting its hidden mystery with a view to the transcendent. For Rouault, this involved exploring the darkest depths of the human soul in order to highlight the redemptive power of suffering. Chagall, by contrast, revealed what awe, exhilaration, and unspeakable happiness come with obedience to God’s law."
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Bob Dylan - Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.
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