Art and faith: Decades of engagement - 1930s

This is Part 6 in a series of posts which aim to demonstrate the breadth of engagement there has been between the Arts and religion within the modern period and into our contemporary experience. The idea is to provide a brief introduction to the artists and initiatives that were prominent in each decade to enable further research. Inevitably, these lists will be partial as there is much that I don’t know and the lists reflect my interests and biases. As such, the primary, but not exclusive, focus is on artists that have engaged with the Christian tradition.

The introduction and the remainder of the series can be found at: Introduction, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s.

• Theatrical Experimentation and Spiritual Renewal go hand in hand between the Wars following the establishment of the Canterbury Festival. In 1930, E. Martin Browne is appointed by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, to be director of religious drama for the diocese. The Religious Drama Society is formed. Browne organises a pageant, The Rock, for which T.S. Eliot writes a series of choruses.
• In 1930, Thomas A. Dorsey, the "Father of Gospel Music", becomes the music director at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago. The church is credited as the birthplace of gospel music in the 1930s. Albertina Walker, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Sallie Martin, James Cleveland, The Staples Singers, and The Edwin Hawkins Singers are among those who sing at the church.
• The Symphony of Psalms is a choral symphony in three movements composed by Igor Stravinsky in 1930 during his neoclassical period. The work was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
• Pablo Picasso paints a Crucifixion (1930) and creates a series of crucifixion drawings (1932) inspired by Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar. The drawings are published in the surrealist magazine Minotaure.
• Along with The Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel de Unamuno's long-form essay La agonía del cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity, 1931) and his novella San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, 1930) are all included on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
• In June 1931, F.T. Marinetti publishes the 'Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art' on the occasion of the International Exhibition of Modern Christian Sacred Art in Padua, which had a Futurist section of twenty-two works by thirteen artists. The publication of this Manifesto led to a censure from Pope Pius XI in a speech given in October 1932 at the inauguration of a new Vatican Art Gallery. The rationalist design by Alberto Sartoris (who had strong links to the Futurists) for Notre-Dame du Bon Conseil in the Swiss Alps at Lourtier also created a scandal in the Swiss press in the same year.
• In 1931 Otto van Rees creates paintings for the niches and the dome of the Pieta Chapel in the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Amsterdam.
• L’Arche collaborate at the Pavillon des Missions Catholiques for the Colonial Exhibition in 1931.
• In 1932, Maire-Alain Couturier paints frescoes for the private chapel in Santa Sabina (Rome) of the Master General.
• Built in 1932, Notre-Dame du Bon Conseil, Lourtier, is located high in the Swiss Alps, and has been called the "forgotten church of Futurism". Designed by Alberto Sartoris, it was the first church built to a rationalist design. It originally incorporated work by the Futurist artist Fillia, and still contains impressive stained glass by Albert Gaeng, an artist from the Saint Luc Group.
• In 1932, a large group of Protestant agitators break into St Hilary’s church in Cornwall and remove or destroy many of the fittings and furnishings, including works by the Newlyn School of Artists.
• In 1932, Sándor Nagy completes frescos in the Chapel of the Maglódi Hospital, Budapest.
• In 1932, Photius Kontoglou begins his fresco painting career by painting, with his pupils Tsarochis and Nikos Engonopoulos, his newly built house in Patisia, Athens.
• In 1932, Chen Yuandu receives baptism and joined the Catholic Church, taking the name of Luke.
• In 1932, Thomas A. Dorsey co-founds the Gospel Choral Union of Chicago – eventually renamed the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses (NCGCC) - a convention where musicians can learn gospel blues. His wife Nettie dies in childbirth at the same time, then 24 hours later, their son. His grief prompts him to write one of his most famous and enduring compositions, ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’.
• Arnold Schoenberg writes his Moses Und Aron (1932). The opera thematically and musically contrasts Moses and Aaron, the Revelation versus the Golden Calf.
• In 1933, Thomas A. Dorsey directs a 600-person chorus at the second meeting of the NCGCC, which now boasts 3,500 members in 24 states.
• In 1933, the Inklings, including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, begin meeting in Oxford. Charles Williams joins them in 1939.
• Alfred Noyes sets out the intellectual steps by which he was led from agnosticism to the Catholic faith in The Unknown God (1934), a widely read work of Christian apologetics which has been described as "the spiritual biography of a generation."
• In 1933, Maurice Morel organizes and participates in the First Exhibition of Modern Religious Art at the Lucy Krogh Gallery, an event that would be repeated in this gallery for several years in a row. The exhibition includes works by Pablo Picasso, Andre Derain, Tsuguhara Foujita, and Georges Rouault, who will become Morel's lifelong friend and supporter.
• From 1934, Joseph Pichard organizes, with the help of the General Office of Religious Art, a major exhibition at the Hôtel de Rohan in Paris, made up of 35 rooms. exhibition and more than 3,000 works.
• In 1934, Evie Hone joins An Túr Gloine, a stained glass workshop set up by Sarah Purser, and produces her first public stained glass work for Saint Naithi’s Church in Dundrum, County Durham.
• In 1935, Joseph Pichard, with L. Salavin and G. Mollard, creates the review L'Art sacré, which in 1937 is taken over by the publishing house of Cerf and its direction given to two Dominicans: Pie-Raymond Régamey and Marie-Alain Couturier.
• T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral is performed at the Canterbury Festival in 1935 with E. Martin Browne as director and Robert Speaight as Becket. The play is then taken to London, where it runs for almost a year and establishes Browne as the leading director of the "poetic drama" movement.
• In 1936, Georges Desvallières’ pre-war dream of painting the Glorious Virgins comes true. Sainte Vierge Reine des anges (Virgin Mary Queen of the Angels), a masterpiece that was originally in the Poor Clares’ Convent in Mazamet, now adorns the Benedictine Monastery of Abu Gosh in Israel.
• In 1936, through attending meetings of the Thomist Study Circle organised by Jacques Maritain, Dominique de Menil meets Marie-Alain Couturier. Couturier's ideas and contacts give significant shape to the arts patronage of John and Dominique de Menil. 
• In 1936, Marie-Alain Couturier and Pie-Raymond Régamey become the chief editors of L'Art Sacré. They continue in this role until 1954.
• The decoration of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Alpes was put out to tender in July 1936 with the panel assessing responses including the philosopher Jacques Maritain, the Catholic art critic Maurice Brillant and the director of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Geneva, Adrien Bovy. Three artists from the Society of St Luke were selected; François Baud for sculptures, Alexandre Cingria for stained glass and Paul Monnier for the sanctuary mural. Other artists used included Paul Bony, Constant Demaison and Jean Hebert-Stevens. The church has rightly been described as an essential stage in understanding the revival of sacred art in the twentieth century but is overshadowed by the fame and significance of the nearby church at Assy.
• Modern Religious Art by Chanoine G. Arnaud d'Agnel is published in 1936.
• Francis Poulenc begins writing choral music in 1936 producing among other works his religious work Litanies à la Vierge Noire, for female or children's voices and organ.
• RCA Victor sign the Monroe Brothers to a recording contract in 1936. They score an immediate hit single with the gospel song "What Would You Give in Exchange For Your Soul?" and go on to record 60 tracks for Victor's Bluebird label between 1936 and 1938.
• In 1937, Emil Nolde’s The Life of Christ is prominently displayed in the Nazi organized ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition.
• In 1937, the Catholic Art Association is founded by Sister Esther Newport as an organisation of artists, art educators, and others interested in Catholic art and its philosophy.
• The Pontifical Catholic Pavilion, created in 1937 for the International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques in Modern Life, brings together, alongside many French artists and craftspeople, a large international contribution (27 countries present a “national” chapel) from which Alexandre Cingria and José-Maria Sert emerge as being of particular note.
• In 1937, sculptor William Edmondson has a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first such show given to an African American by this institution. 
• In 1938, at the instigation of Mgr. Costantini, the Art Department of Furen [Fu Jen] Catholic University in Beijing, led by Luke Chen Yuandu, organizes and conducts a series of itinerary exhibitions in Budapest, Vienna and the Vatican.
• In 1938, Daniel Johnson Fleming publishes Each with His Own Brush: Contemporary Christian Art in Asia and Africa, the first attempt to bring together pictures of Christian paintings from outside Europe.
• In 1938, Horace Pippin paints Christ (Crowned with Thorns), the first of ten paintings exploring biblical subject matter and spiritual themes.
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe pushes spiritual music into the mainstream and helps pioneer the rise of pop-gospel, beginning in 1938 with the recording ‘Rock Me’ and with her 1939 hit ‘This Train’.
• The Cyrene Mission becomes famous for its localised art of Christian content which was developed first in the classrooms and then extended to decorate the chapel. Edward “Ned” Paterson, a pioneering art teacher, founds the Cyrene School near Bulawayo in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he moves to in 1939. The school focuses on practical and agricultural education and is the first African school in Rhodesia to have art classes. Some of Rhodesia’s first professional African artists emerge from Cyrene, including Sam Songo, Lazarus Khumalo, and Kingsley Sambo.
• In 1939, Edwin Muir has a religious experience in St Andrews and from then onwards thinks of himself as Christian, seeing Christianity being as revolutionary as socialism.
• In March 1939, E. Martin Browne directs T.S. Eliot's second play, The Family Reunion, in London and in the same year he launches a touring company, the "Pilgrim Players", whose programme was dominated by the plays of Eliot and, to a lesser degree, of James Bridie (O. H. Mavor), the Scottish dramatist.
• Maurice Denis’ History of religious art is published in 1939.
• The 1939 publication of Passion, a book of woodcuts, engravings and color etchings makes George Rouault's work more accessible.
• In 1939, Maire-Alain Couturier is asked to assist in commissioning for Notre-Dame de Toute Grace du Plateau d'Assy.
• Painted between 1939 and 1940, William H. Johnson's Jesus and the Three Marys marks the beginning of Johnson's five-year period of engagement with biblical subjects.
• Jacques Maritain’s Religion et Culture (1930), T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (1930) and Burnt Norton (1936), Charles Williams’ War in Heaven (1930), Many Dimensions (1930), The Place of the Lion (1931), The Greater Trumps (1932), Shadows of Ecstasy (1933), and Descent into Hell (1937), Miquel de Unamuno’s Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr (1930), Francois Mauriac’s Ce qui était perdu (1930), Le Nœud de vipères (1932), Le Mystère Frontenac (1933), La Fin de la nuit (1935), Les Anges noirs (1936), and Les Chemins de la mer (1939), C.S. Lewis’ Pilgrim's Regress (1933) and Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors (1934) and Gaudy Night (1935), Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest (1936) and Mouchette (1937), David Jones’ In Parenthesis (1937), John Gray’s Park (1932), Jerzy Andrzejewski's 'Mode of the Heart' (1938), Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938) and The Confidential Agent (1939), and JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) are published.
• James Bridie’s Tobias and the Angel (1930) and Jonah and the Whale (1932), T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Family Reunion (1939), Charles Williams’ Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury (1936), Christopher Fry’s The Boy with a Cart (1938), and Dorothy L Sayers’ The Zeal of Thy House (1937) are performed.

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Bill Fay - Countless Branches.

Connections of Sister Corita Kent and Norman Nicholson

Tracing the connections between artists that were either part of the Church and were engaged by the Church in the 20th century is an important element in the argument that the level and extent of the engagement between the Church and the Arts has been more significant that is generally acknowledged. Some of my posts tracing these connections include:   

• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2012/09/airbrushed-from-art-history-update.html
http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2011/08/beyond-airbrushed-from-art-history.html
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/search/label/sabbatical
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2016/06/christianity-and-literature.html
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2017/12/faith-mystery-poetry.html
http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2016/08/thomas-merton-and-latin-american-poets.html
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-rough-guide-to-christian-art.html
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2014/04/orthodoxy-and-music.html
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2012/04/contemporary-choral-music.html

Most recently, I've been reading about the work and friendships of the US nun Sister Corita Kent and also of the British poet Norman Nicholson:

The Catholic Art Association was founded in 1937 by Sister Esther Newport as an organisation of artists, art educators, and others interested in Catholic art and its philosophy, and created the world into which Sister Corita Mary stepped when she began her career as an inspirational artist and teacher at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles in 1945.

'Much of Kent’s artistic activism came out of her close friendship with Father Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest best known for his radical antiwar activism. Kent and Berrigan carried on an extensive correspondence and collaborated on a number of projects. She designed the covers for many of Berrigan’s books, including The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Beacon Press, 1970), his free-verse play about his trial and conviction for burning draft files with napalm at the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board in 1968. Berrigan penned the introduction for Kent’s book Footnotes and Headlines, and she used both his published writings and personal letters in numerous prints.'

Her screenprint "Powerup" (1965) 'melds a sermon on spiritual fulfillment by an activist priest, Daniel Berrigan, with the advertising catch-phrase of the Richfield Oil Corporation.'

'“An Evening with God” which took place at the Boston Tea Party, a rock music club, and featured performances, music, conversation, and an informal communion meal of store-bought bread and wine' was 'an event planned by Kent, the priest Daniel Berrigan, the musician Judy Collins, and the Harvard professor Harvey Cox.'

Berrigan said of Kent, "She introduces the intuitive, the unpredictable into religion, and thereby threatens the essentially masculine, terribly efficient, chancery-ridden, law-abiding, file-cabinet church."

Berrigan was part of a 'colorful cast of friends and associates who shared both with him, or crossed his path.' 'Think Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Luther King, Ernesto Cardenal, and Martin Sheen, to list the best known.'

Norman Nicholson 'was always an active and enthusiastic member of a vibrant and close-knit nationwide web which interlinked the leading writers and artists of the day. T.S. Eliot was typically this web’s central figure, but other notable participants included E. Martin Browne, Kathleen Raine, Anne Ridler, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Michael and Janet Roberts, Bro. George Every and very many more.'

Nicholson was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, where Anne Ridler was Eliot's secretary. Nicholson was sometimes a weekend guest at Helen Sutherland's house parties, which included writers such as Eliot. 'For a short period, at the beginning of World War II, Norman Nicholson and Kathleen Raine were very close.' 'Kathleen and Norman helped each other with their first collections and the title of Kathleen Raine's - Stone and Flower - is a quote taken from one of Norman's poems. Many of the poems in Norman's second collection - Rock Face - were either written for Kathleen, or came out of their conversations and collaborations.'

The sculptor Josefina de Vasconcellos and her husband Delmar Banner on moving to Cumbria also made friends with Cumbria’s own artistic community, befriending Beatrix Potter and Nicholson.

In An Anthology of Religious Verse, which he edited, Nicholson writes that to ‘many modern poets the events of Our Lord’s life are so vivid that they seem to be contemporary, so that it is natural for them to write in the language, imagery and form of our time.’ The structure of his book deals with modern conceptions of God and of life in relation to God. Poets included are: W.H. Auden, Hilaire Belloc, S.L. Bethell, G.K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, Clifford Dyment, T.S. Eliot, George Every, M. Farrow, David Gascoyne, Thomas Hardy, Rayner Heppenstall, G.M. Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, Andrew Murray, Norman Nicholson, J.D.C. Pellow, Ruth Pitter, Anne Ridler, Michael Roberts, Walter Roberts, John Short, Tambimuttu, Allen Tate, Dylan Thomas, Charles Williams, W.B. Yeats and Andrew Young.

Nicholson contributed to the Christian verse drama revival which began in 1930 when E. Martin Browne was appointed by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, to be director of religious drama for the diocese. 'One of Browne's early assignments was to organise a pageant, The Rock, to raise funds for the building of Anglican churches. At the request of Bishop Bell, T. S. Eliot wrote a series of choruses linking the loosely historical scenes of the pageant, which was played by amateurs and presented at Sadler's Wells Theatre for a fortnight's run in summer 1934.

After this success, Bell invited Eliot and Browne to work on a play to be written by Eliot and presented at the Canterbury Festival the following year, with Browne as director. The title was Murder in the Cathedral and it was this production that established the collaboration between Eliot as poet-playwright and Martin Browne as director which was to last for twenty years ... It established Browne as the leading director of the "poetic drama" movement, which was then undergoing something of a revival ...

In 1945 Browne took over the 150-seater Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, and devoted it for the next three years to the production of modern verse plays, with first productions of plays by Christopher Fry, Ronald Duncan, Norman Nicholson and Anne Ridler, all directed by Browne himself.'

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Norman Nicholson - September On The Mosses.

Passion Plays for Lent

Crosslight: A Passion Play presented by Riding Lights Theatre Company is “A fascinating psychological drama… The show asks questions about what we learn through failure, the importance of forgiveness and the power of redemption… Tremendous.” (York Press)

The disciple chosen to lead, is in pieces.

Caught in the crosslight of the flickering candles at the last supper, the torches of Gethsemane, the firelight in the courtyard, by the searching gaze of his Lord, Simon ‘the rock’ is shattered.

As he hangs from the cross, Jesus is surrounded by a jeering crowd, laughing at his claim to be the Son of God. A small group of family and friends stands by until the agony ends. But the great friend who, more than any other, has stood by Jesus throughout the story is conspicuous by his absence.

One man is missing – one who knows the truth.

Crosslight draws us into the dramatic events of Christ’s Passion and into the experience of one disciple who failed, despite everything he believed so passionately…


The Gospel of Matthew by Candlelight is touring churches in the South East of England. Experience a stunning, virtuoso delivery of the greatest story ever told... as Jesus's followers first heard it... in a darkness illuminated purely by candlelight and the Word!!

Acclaimed by critics and audiences in theatres and churches throughout the UK, award-winning actor George Dillon presents an unforgettable vision of Jesus in his highly intense, very human and occasionally humorous solo staging of the first Gospel.

Short-listed for The Stage's 'Best Actor' Award in Edinburgh, Dillon’s epic, impassioned performance of his own translation portrays Jesus not as a meek and mild lamb to the slaughter but as a contemporary raging fighter for God.

 

The Devil's Passion or Easter in Hell is a divine comedy written & performed by award-winning playwright Justin Butcher. Butcher, author of the world-famous “Scaramouche Jones”, starring Pete Postlethwaite & directed by Rupert Goold, the hit anti-war satire “The Madness Of George Dubya” and the controversially acclaimed “Go To Gaza, Drink The Sea”, turns his pen to the greatest story of all. By turns comic, gripping, poetic, and heart-stirring, The Devil’s Passion offers a radically fresh perspective on the timeless narrative, an audacious hell’s-eye-view of the Passion of Christ from a master storyteller.

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Adrian Snell - Gethsemene.

Christian Arts renaissance: Major or minor?

In 1983 former pupil of C.S. Lewis, the literary historian, Harry Blamires, wrote:

'Lewis began writing just at the point when this minor Christian renaissance in literature was taking off. His Pilgrim's Regress came out in 1933. And the 1930s were a remarkable decade in this respect. Eliot's Ash Wednesday came out in 1930, The Rock in 1934, Murder in the Cathedral in 1935 and Burnt Norton in 1936. Charles Williams's War in Heaven was published in 1930, The Place of the Lion in 1931, The Greater Trumps in 1932, and his play Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury in 1936. Helen Waddell's Peter Abelard came out in 1933. Meanwhile on the stage James Bridie had great popular successes with his biblical plays Tobias and the Angel (1930) and Jonah and the Whale (1932). Then by 1937 Christopher Fry was launched with The Boy with a Cart. That same year saw Dorothy Sayers's The Zeal of Thy House performed, and David Jones's In Parenthesis and Tolkien's The Hobbit published. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet followed in 1938, along with Williams's Taliessin Through Logres and Greene's Brighton Rock. Eliot's Family Reunion followed in 1939, Greene's The Power and the Glory in 1940. During the same decade Evelyn Waugh was getting known and Rose Macauley was in spate. Edwin Muir, Andrew Young and Francis Berry appeared in print.

So when the literary historian looks back at the English literary scene in the 1930s and 1940s he is going to see C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, not as freakish throwbacks, but as initial contributors to what I have called a Christian literary renaissance, if a minor one.'

This summary, which is accurate as far as it goes, illustrates some of the reasons why a Christian renaissance in the Arts during the twentieth century and into the present is not more widely recognised and acknowledged.

Blamires, like many whose writings touch on this renaissance, reaches his conclusion regarding a minor Christian literary renaissance as part of a different focus i.e. his interest in C.S. Lewis, Lewis' circle and its influence. In other words, he didn't write about this Christian renaissance per se and, therefore, did not explore it in depth. We still await an Arts historian willing and able to do.

As a result, there is much that Blamires misses, as well as much that he includes. He neglects to mention that Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were primarily responsible for the entry of modern fantasy fiction into the mainstream of publishing or that Lewis made a significant contribution to the development of science fiction or that many of the writers and works he lists formed the core of the Verse Drama movement. Awareness of this latter movement also brings writers such as Gordon Bottomley, Ronald Duncan, Norman Nicholson and Anne Ridler onto the stage. This movement was partly facilitated by George Bell's founding of the Canterbury Festival, when Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, which led to the formation of the Religious Drama Society of Great Britain under the directorship of E. Martin Browne.

Bell was also active in the visual arts, particularly in the Diocese of Chichester, where his commissioning and appointments, such as Walter Hussey to be Dean of Chichester Cathedral, resulted in significant commissions at Berwick Parish Church, Chichester Cathedral and the Chapel of the Ascension at Bishop Otter College. These commissions essentially began an engagement with the visual arts that continues into the present and which has resulted in artist residencies, exhibitions, installations and commissions, both temporary and permanent, in churches and cathedrals throughout the UK.

So, by his focus on literary works alone, Blamires also misses the bigger picture of the wider renaissance. Again, this is a common shortcoming in those who touch on this renaissance because of the other agendas they are primarily pursuing.

Similarly, Blamires neglects an international dimension. From a literary perspective, had he explored the international dimension the minor renaissance he notes might, again, have appeared more significant. In this respect he could have noted the emergence of the Modern Catholic Novel as part of the French Catholic Revival. Theodore P. Fraser writes, in The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, that:

"The Catholic novel in Europe as we know it today originated in French literature of the nineteenth century. Originally part of the neo-romantic reaction against Enlightenment philosophy and the anti-religious doctrines of the Revolution, the Catholic novel attained fruition and became an accomplished literary form spearheading the renouveau catholique, or Catholic literary revival. This literary movement contained in its ranks a number of brilliant writers (Bloy, Péguy, Huysmans, Bernanos, Mauriac, Claudel, Jacques Maritain, and Jacques Rivière, to name the most important) who reached maturity at the century's end or during the decade of World War I, and it essentially took the form of a strong, even violent, reaction of these French Catholic writers against the doctrine of positivism that had gained preeminence in French political and cultural circles in the last third at least of the nineteenth century."

Marian E. Crowe noted in 2007, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that "the past eighty years have seen high-quality Catholic novels by Maurice Baring, A. J. Cronin, Compton Mackenzie, Antonia White, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Braine, Rumer Godden, and Anne Redmon" and that "... Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland, and Piers Paul Read ... do not hesitate to include the "craggy" and "paradoxical" parts of Catholicism."

Citing over two decades of experience publishing a who’s who of what he calls “believing writers” (Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, Elie Wiesel, Mark Helprin, and Mary Karr (a Catholic convert), Gregory Wolfe has asserted: "The myth of secularism triumphant in the literary arts is just that—a myth. Yet making lists of counterexamples does not get at a deeper matter. It has to do with the way that faith takes on different tones and dimensions depending on the culture surrounding it."

So, from a literary perspective, writers such as W.H. Auden, Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Rhidian Brook, Jack Clemo, Shusaku Endo, U.E. Fanthorpe, William Golding, Geoffrey Hill, P.D. James, Elizabeth Jennings, David Lodge, Sara Maitland, Czesław Miłosz, Nicholas Mosley, Les Murray, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, James Robertson, R.S. Thomas, Salley Vickers, Niall Williams and Tim Winton, can all be cited, among others, as of relevance to the wider ongoing renaissance. In 'popular' fiction, John Grisham, Susan Howatch, Mary Doria Russell, Piers Paul Read, Ann Rice and Morris West, among others, can be noted. Theological themes and practices of faith also continue to be explored in contemporary fiction. The work of Douglas Coupland or novels such as Patrick Gale's A Perfectly Good Man and Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry being a few examples. Additionally, novelists have been re-examining the life of Christ and his followers through novels such as: Jim Crace's Quarantine, Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son, Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Ann Rice's Christ the Lord series, Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary, and Niall Williams' John, among others.
Joseph Pearce suggests in Literary Converts that: "[G. K.] Chesterton's 'coming out' as a Christian had a profound effect, similar in its influence to Newman's equally candid confession of othodoxy more than fifty years earlier. In many ways it heralded a Christian literary revival which, throughout the twentieth century, represented an evocative artistic and intellectual response to the prevailing agnosticism of the age. Dr Barbara Reynolds, the Dante scholar and friend and biographer of Dorothy L. Sayers, described this literary revival as 'a network of minds energizing each other'. Besides Chesterton, its leading protagonists included T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Siegfried Sassoon, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Williams, R. H. Benson, Ronald Knox, Edith Sitwell, Roy Campbell, Maurice Baring, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Dorothy L. Sayers, Alfred Noyes, Compton Mackenzie, David Jones, Christopher Dawson, Malcolm Muggeridge, R. S. Thomas and George Mackay Brown. Its influence spread beyond the sphere of literature. Alec Guinness, Ernest Milton and Robert Speaight were among the thespians whose lives were interwoven with those of their Christian literary contemporaries."

All this reflects primarily Western literature and does not touch the visual arts which in both Western and non-Western forms saw and see significant engagement between Christianity and modern art. I have sought to document much of this engagement in my series of posts entitled 'Airbrushed from Art History' and 'Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage'.

It may well be that all this engagement between the Arts and Christianity is still judged to be a minor renaissance. My point, however, is that the significance of this ongoing renaissance cannot be properly assessed and judged until it is considered and documented historically as a whole. While our record of it remains fragmentary, its significance cannot be fully or fairly evaluated.

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T.S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday.

Why the Bible is box office

The Guardian has a useful summary of twentieth century religious drama as a result of several new productions which suggest that the Bible is currently box office:

'Temple by Steve Waters opens next month at the Donmar Warehouse in London ...  a fictionalised version of the clash between clergy and anti-capitalist protesters during the occupation of the piazza outside St Paul’s in 2011-12.

And, last week, Temple Church in London became a temporary stage for performances of a new production by director James Dacre of Shakespeare’s King John, in which the English monarch faces inquisition and excommunication by a cardinal sent from Pope Innocent III ...

Two recent openings at the National Theatre – a revival of Shaw’s Man and Superman and Tom Stoppard’s new play The Hard Problem – feature debates, Shavian and neo-Shavian respectively, about the likelihood of God. And the West End has just staged a revival of Peter Barnes’s 1969 comedy The Ruling Class, with James McAvoy as an English aristocrat who shocks his Anglican, Tory family by announcing that he is the Risen Christ.'

It is also interesting to compare and contrast this article with a 2012 Guardian article claiming that, 'despite its roots in ritual, religion gets barely a look-in on stage these days.'

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Pops Staples - Somebody Was Watching.