In her 1937 memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein lamented over the demolition of her childhood home in Oakland, California, writing, “there is no there there.” Although her reflection was deeply personal and contextual, in the wake of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Stein’s paradoxical expression was displaced from its particular significance and came to represent a wholesale critique of the “placeless” characteristic of American cities in the twentieth century. The humanist response to the crisis of modern life inspired by Jacobs and Whyte—termed “placemaking” in the 1970s—has garnered some interest in contemporary Christian theological discourse, inspired in part by Wendell Berry’s writings on local ecosystems as the foundation stone of healthy communities. Jennifer Allen Craft’s Placemaking and the Arts: Cultivating the Christian Life is the latest Christian theological engagement with placemaking, following Craig G. Bartholomew’s Where Mortals Dwell, Eric O. Jacobsen’s The Space Between and John Inge’s A Christian Theology of Place. In her book, Craft weaves together biblical exegesis, art criticism, environmental and social ethics, and urban and agrarian studies to present a theology of the arts that illuminates the rootedness of artistic practice in place and our contingent ethical responsibilities to the spaces we inhabit. The contributions of Craft’s thoughtfully composed work are many, but, for the purposes of this response, I will focus on the theme that I believe to be the most generative component of her book, the ramifications of God’s kenotic outpouring on placemaking, and suggest ways that Craft’s account of kenosis might serve to interrogate the hazards of the placemaking movement itself.

Drawing on Balthasar’s Trinitarian framework of kenotic love—the “self-emptying of the persons of the Trinity to one another”—and Moltmann’s kenotic theology of creation, Craft contends that the human imitation of divine kenosis points in two directions: inwardly to reimagine and restructure our aspirations and desires, and outwardly to call one into participatory action in the work of creation (36). The dual nature of kenotic love, which balances internal examination with external operation, gestures toward humanity’s unique “identity as placemakers” whose shared vocation is to “give order to and care for the particular places we find ourselves in” (40). This calling, Craft argues, is characterized by a spirit of servanthood modeled after Christ’s kenotic work in the world; that is, the Christian life is centered around a self-emptying love that transforms particular people into better stewards of particular places. As Craft writes, “We are very much placed in this often-disordered world, and by modeling our placemaking actions after Christ’s own, we may help contribute to the reordering of reality through the power of Christ in us” (43). What’s more, drawing on Rowan Williams’s work on Christian resurrection, Craft underscores the reciprocal nature of kenotic placemaking by gesturing toward a third direction of transformation. The human mimicry of divine kenosis does not simply move from inward self-reflection to outward transformative action, Craft notes, but rather, the places we occupy in turn transform its inhabitants. These places “[form] the venue of our own transformation and our pursuit of beauty” (43).

Although Craft does not explicitly use kenotic love as a means to critique placemaking practices, I found her location of divine kenosis within a larger constructive theology of place to be a helpful lens to interrogate the often-conflicting values of placemaking initiatives. At its best, placemaking mirrors the multidirectional nature of kenosis through its collaborative approach to public planning and design processes, which aids in a collective reimagining of everyday spaces. The imaginative formation that placemaking aims to provide, as Craft skillfully articulates, is a readiness to consider particular developments as one component within a larger network of places and to work toward unique and holistic solutions that address the economic, social, environmental, and pragmatic concerns of a given community. Furthermore, Craft’s exposition on the complex relations of kenotic love provide a helpful analogy to begin to grapple with the intricate systems embedded in the politics of a place and to reject top-down programs of land redevelopment in favor of grassroots revitalization. Conversely, though Craft does not make this connection herself, kenotic theology can also illuminate the ways in which placemaking efforts themselves often slip into a kenotic performativity that pays lip service to community-centered collaborative design, while buttressing and, in some cases, advancing social, economic, and racial inequity. To her credit, Craft is careful to posit important caveats against the dangers of a “geographic imagination” of exclusion (174) and questions the veracity of community representation in public art (181), however, I believe what’s missing from Placemaking and the Arts is a critical engagement with the way racial and spatial discrimination is frequently perpetuated under the guise of artistic placemaking. In other words, if, as Craft aptly claims, “our sense of place and placemaking actions share a core relationship with how we have ordered our loves within those places” (14), how might kenotic love reveal the ways in which the aesthetic and social orders of artistic placemaking have been (to use Lauren Winner’s term) characteristically damaged?

Take, for instance, Craft’s own example of mural painting as a constructive placemaking practice in the Venice area of Los Angeles (180). Absent from Craft’s laudatory account of mural art is how neighborhood improvement projects, including mural installations, have and continue to function in tandem with the policing of certain bodies to ostensibly promote public safety and urban livability. In the case of Venice, the imbrication of Los Angeles gang injunctions with urban revitalization efforts served to mutually reinforce the criminalization of alleged gang-related activities, effectively creating a new code of sociality that underscored racial prejudice. The gang injunctions demarcated “safety zones” that forbade gang members from assembling, usually in desirable, up-and-coming areas such as Venice Boulevard and Abbot Kinney Boulevard, and granted executive powers to police, enabling law enforcement to detain people of color without lawful cause (e.g., congregating in the street with their family members) while ignoring the minor legal infringements of white transplants (e.g., walking their dogs off-leash or bicycling without reflectors). In this new spatial reality, particular social and aesthetic practices are penalized, and others are championed—selling loose cigarettes without a tax stamp in front of a beauty supply store versus slinging $10 lattes fortified with CBD oil at the local farmers market, brown-bagging a forty-ounce on the curb versus sipping a pint of artisanal lager at an outdoor café, creating self-governed graffiti art versus bureaucratically-sanctioned mural art—to ensure that so-called undesirable behaviors (and, thereby, undesirable residents) are displaced from their communities to make room for middle-class professionals. Situated within the story of community dispossession in Los Angeles (similarly, Atlanta, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, the list goes on), Craft’s auspicious perspective that “actions of artistic placemaking can serve to energize [places] and make people want to be there, inviting members of the community, along with tourists, into a hospitable and beautiful space” bends toward the ominous (180). When artistic placemaking practices are complicit in the disempowerment and expulsion of racialized and criminalized bodies, it is essential that we interrogate how these artistic interventions actually function within a politics of place and who these practices are really for.

Undergirding Craft’s largely commendatory perspective on artistic placemaking practices is the claim that placemaking enacts a kind of formative communitarianism built upon the daily “liturgies” (the multiplicities of repetitive and reciprocating movements that enliven a space) of the people who inhabit a place. Gesturing toward her exposition on the correlative love of kenotic outpouring, Craft argues that “how we make our place then makes us, or forms us,” not into autonomous individuals within a shared space, but into “community participants [who are formed] into people of a place by being people active in place” (173). Once more, what is not present in Placemaking and the Arts is a critical analysis of communitarianism and who is “in” and who is “out of place” in our notions of community and community flourishing. In other words, what kinds of communities do placemaking practices form and who is included and excluded in community formation? As Iris Marion Young observes in Justice and the Politics of Difference, “The most serious political consequence of the desire for community, or for copresence and mutual identification with others, is that it often operates to exclude or oppress those experienced as different” (234). While Craft is attentive to the problem of community aspirations masquerading as exclusionary tactics borne out of shared racism, sexism, and classism, she locates the problems of marginalization and displacement outside of placemaking practices:

Placemaking can very often be a form of protest against public space and practice that is exclusionary or oppressive, for instance, images of the city that are conceptualized within a masculine framework and tend to produce places that are prohibitive against women in the public realm. These exclusionary spaces very often relate to gender, race, socioeconomic status, or religion, and what the liturgies of the placemaking movement seek to create in response are places that embrace otherness, solidifying our sense of identity in positive ways while reconciling relationships that have had barriers set between them (sometimes metaphorical and sometimes physical). (174)

Here, Craft contends that placemaking is a solution, not an accomplice, to the problem of social identification over and against the “abjected Other” (Justice and the Politics of Difference, 147). However, even the Project for Public Spaces, a central organization of the placemaking movement, put forth a proposed code of ethics in 2016, which includes commitments to community inclusion and against unintended community harm (“At the very least, we will ensure that any physical intervention will not harm the communities affected by the project”).1 Similarly, the American Planning Association offers online educational sessions to planning professionals focused on the complicated connections between placemaking and gentrification. To say that placemaking “works toward the common good” without “collapsing individual or local identity” shrouds the deeply embedded divisions of racism, sexism, and classism in our neighborhoods and cities, and passes over the ways placemaking has been co-opted by developers, municipalities, and closed communities to ostracize and displace people who are deemed illegitimate members. What’s more, it obscures the way nostalgic and, at times, nationalistic appeals to “community” have been used to advance social repression and surveillance.

Rather than simply a case of omission, however, I wonder if Craft’s overwhelmingly positive account of placemaking is rooted in her understanding of divine kenosis and the way beauty operates within kenotic placemaking. For Craft, essential to the kenotic movement from self-reflection to self-giving practice, is the role of the arts as a “formative presence and practice” that fosters a shared understanding of place through communal participation in the beautiful (178). Building off of Trevor Hart’s conception of beauty as an ethical conduit to selfless action, Craft writes, “Beauty, therefore, must draw one out of oneself in an act of love; it ‘renders the self adjacent’ . . . in order to bring about a new perception and ethical or justice-seeking action. . . . The manner in which we perceive beauty is thus key to understanding the ways that ecological and socially conscious action might occur” (44). Indeed, as Craft perceptively notes, the way that one understands the beautiful profoundly influences placemaking practices—from shared notions of the public good and community development to definitions of “highest and best use,” “vacant land,” and “underutilized property”—and, although Craft does not interrogate these terms, she begins to question the means of ethical production associated with our assessment of what is beautiful, warning against a “failure of imagination” that “obstruct[s] compassion and obscure[s] the particularity of creatures and places” (42).

However, Craft’s conflation of beauty (which she does not necessarily define, but is often associated with natural or physical beauty) with goodness, love, and empathy belies the multitude of ways that the beautiful has functioned, not as an ethical means to nurture a “sympathetic imagination” (177), but as an apparatus of social control. In terms of placemaking, however, what concerns me about Craft’s theological account of beauty is that it dangerously flirts with the same misconceptions of the “placeless” architectural styles she critiques. Craft’s contestation that the beautiful—be it a work of art, a natural landscape, or a well-designed building—can provide the context in which “one’s moral capacities [are] heightened and stimulated to encounter ‘the other’ in a different light,” without qualification, rearticulates, in a different register, the same modernist predilection for spatial forms over social processes. Although Craft’s account of “art’s capacity for moral influence” yearns for an artistic placemaking that displaces outmoded and destructive imaginations and actions and “replace[s] them with new contexts that communicate, hopefully, a vision of the kingdom and the beauty of the cross,” without wrestling with the ways beauty, art, and placemaking have been absorbed into unjust practices and used to reify existing spatial and racial hierarchies, Craft’s innovative theological framework is in danger of reproducing the architectural determinism she finds fault with.

As I expressed at the opening of my response, Craft’s Placemaking and the Arts offers a number of important contributions to the recent Christian theological engagements with placemaking as well as the field of theology and the arts in general. To my mind, Craft’s most important theological contribution is her foregrounding of African American and Indigenous Peoples’ art (a long-awaited intervention in IVP Academic’s Studies in Theology and the Arts series), including an extended analysis of the quilts of Gee’s Bend and the work of Kerry James Marshall, in her exhortation to cultivate a constructive theological imagination within the context of artistic placemaking practices. In particular, Craft’s analysis of Marshall’s Garden Projects speaks powerfully to the ways utopic visions of a built environment that serve as the foundation to a new moral and aesthetic framework often disintegrate into oppressive measures of social control and repression. As Craft continues to engage in theological accounts of the built environment, I hope to see more of this kind of critical engagement with underrepresented voices that challenge the logics of discriminatory policies, even within the placemaking movement itself.

In her deep and ambitious work, Jennifer Allen Craft invites us into a systematic and interdisciplinary conversation about what it means to think theologically about place, about art, and about how the arts may effect an imaginative participation in and with our own places. Joining conversations in place studies with theology and the arts, Craft offers a vision of art that is capable of cultivating an “imagining of and love for . . . the communities in which we are called,” navigating the practice of placemaking in the natural world, the home, the church, and society (16).

In the service of that goal, Craft undergirds her entire project with a robust theological anthropology, whereby we are not merely some kind of creature made in the image of some God, but are embodied, embedded creatures made in the image of the creative and inviting God—whose work we join by engaging in responsible and imaginative ways of being in our place.

From there, the work sits astride an interdisciplinary divide—ably conversant in the dialect of biblical theology as well as systematics, reaching out to root both art and place in the whole salvation economy, from creation to redemption—looking forward in eschatological hope but mindful of a proleptic inauguration that embeds us in our “homesteading” here, even as we await the final fulfillment of what it means to behold God and to find our “homecoming” in the new creation. Craft also describes her telos as a “practical theology of the arts,” yet she takes great care to illuminate what “practical” means for this investigation (22). For Craft, practical does not solely delineate the sphere of her theological endeavor (while the congregation is a “place,” so is the natural world, the home, and society at large) but rather its focus. She returns us again and again to the practices that form our imaginations, shape our places, and offer us the possibility of meaningful habitation.

All of this reaches its fulfillment in the register of moral theology as she calls for “a deeply considered and habituated religious imagination in the places of this world” (41). This call is not a secondary set of questions to be entertained after we have sorted through the theological dimensions of place. The call, rather, originates from the very heart of Craft’s Christology and plays out in the full soteriological trajectory from creation to incarnation to eschaton. Artistry and placemaking, Craft tells us, aim at nothing short of the kingdom of God, pursued by believers through “the act of discipleship” and (one presumes) by all persons through “social justice in the world” (222). Faithful living in our places cannot be separated from God’s presence there, nor from the artist’s participation in and with God’s redemptive project through her own acts of creative transformation (226).

In leading us to the visual arts, the form of her analysis is pedagogical, offering her readers a master class in theological aesthetics but without ever deigning to be didactic. Rather than constraining the images she holds up to view, seeking to render them into words, Craft moves her reader through the image by her words. Not content merely to teach us about the theological import of these visual images, she instead embodies a deeply incarnational logic in her analysis, refusing to separate word and image, and thusly teaching us the theological significance even as we join her in practicing it.

But neither are word and image collapsed into one. By beginning each chapter with rich doctrinal exploration including a good number of what she calls “detours” and “returns” she opens a space—a distance—wherein we dwell with her, following her deft connections and questions before arriving at the images and image makers she selects (81, 92). In this space, we are forced to tarry awhile as she asks for our attention and demands we employ our own imaginations in order to follow the intersections she navigates. As readers, we are not confronted with commentary on visual images but are confounded by all that we have not considered about images and about their moral, placemaking power over us.

Two question, then, emerge for me as I indwell her arguments so artfully constructed. First, what is it about beauty and art that draws the line between perception and “attentive and ethically minded action in the world” (46)? Her later argument for beauty’s ability to convey divine presence (chapter 4) considers its sacramental nature, sacred form, and Trinitarian context. Here our perception of beauty is shaped by worship and recognition of divine kenosis and, in turn, shapes that worship and our knowledge and embodiment of the Christian life (147).

But as early as chapter 2, she begins to make strong connections between and among art, perception, and moral action in the natural world itself and without this later communal, liturgical scaffolding. What I hope to grasp is whether she is here positing a necessary movement from attention to “reformed action and ethical imagining of our work in [our] places” (47)? Or, to use her final terminology, what is the difference between beauty (art) being the “context for development of theological imagination” and it becoming a “catalyst for theological reflection and mission . . . as members of the kingdom of God” (200)?

Craft often stops short of the threshold of a necessary movement from beauty/attention to moral imagining/action, since many of her claims about the agency of art lie in the register of what it can do or may do. At other times, she makes more direct claims—i.e., “Beauty forms a structure for social imaginaries and indwelling in our places while also functioning as ethical indicator” (199); “beauty [is] . . . a catalyst for renewed thinking on our proper place in relation to one another and the given creation” (228); “art . . . form[s] our loves to better live and act in the world . . . motivating our sense of responsibility and calling in the natural world” (229).1

Her paired claims about context and catalyst, then, place art in the epistemological and ethical register. In the realm of knowing, she tells us, “Art becomes a catalyst for epistemological reflection, knowledge acquired through simply placing us further in the world” (201). As a form of reflection and attention—primarily to our place in the order of things and in our particular places—we then are led to the realm of the moral, toward “ethical imagining” and “ethically minded action.”

But the question remains for the captivated reader: why is this so? If art (in place) can shape our perception (toward action), what is the guarantor that our perception will be shaped rightly? What is it that ensures, or even makes likely, that our attention will lead us to ethical action? Is there a feature of embeddedness that is inherently good or morally edifying? Is it internal and possibly inchoate—a feature of art itself or at least certain kinds of art?2 Is it external and guided—the working of the Spirit (who, in chapter 6, gives inspiration and accomplishes transformation) that serves as a warrant for the posited relationship between beauty and truth, between attention and moral action? Ultimately, the question becomes: apart from the ecclesial context and its pursuit of rightly formed loves, how far may we press the connection between Beauty (perception and attention), Truth (right knowing), and Goodness (moral action)?3

The question looms not because its possibilities tempt me but because its failures haunt me.

Not to put too fine a point on it (one always hesitates to trot out a rejoinder that begins with Nazis), but we know all too well of the aesthetically attuned SS officer and his love of beauty. What, then, shall we do with prisoner choirs at Sachsenhausen? Symphony orchestras at Auschwitz? When confronted with art and beauty in particular places (one of Craft’s wise and crucial criteria), the attention of the SS officer was captured and held but did not lead to ethical action in that place and toward the people there. The great compositions of Wagner were played at Dachau and German concert broadcasts filled the air at Buchenwald. There, too, the German imagination was stirred, but only to conceive of ever more creative and effective strategies of extermination. Clearly, beauty and even attention can fail to evoke the “sympathetic imagination” (Hart) and thereby fail to produce moral and ethical work (177).4

Less dramatic, what of the great capitalist who is drawn precisely by the beautiful, undisturbed landscape to develop it, people it, and employ its resources in destructive ways? Could not an engineer’s “heightened awareness” of the natural world assist her in developing ever more rapacious mining equipment? Or might the scientist’s well-honed attention to nuance and particularity enable her to locate and extract the maximum amount of natural resources from her place? These may be unfair examples, since though the capitalist-engineer-scientist may encounter beauty, they do not travel through the experience of art, which plays a central role in Craft’s thesis. What role, then, could art have in mitigating or—in her words, “transforming”—this form of attention and this relation to the beauty of one’s place? And, as with the camp officer, is something necessary in addition to art in order to produce the moral transformation she posits? In short, does Balthasar’s theological aesthetics need the church?

If not, what is it that makes up the lack? Craft and her interlocutors make a compelling case that art “that engages us in perception of the natural world and its beauty” may indeed “motivat[e] us to a deeper perception and experience of place,” but what ensures, as Craft argues, that this will “produc[e] just and responsible action in the world” (47)? What shall we do with these instances that work against the internal relation of beauty and goodness so ably posited by Craft? I am moved by her interlocutors (Kathryn Alexander, Trevor Hart, et al.), but also live chastened by Wendell Berry’s exhortation to “praise ignorance, for what man/ has not encountered he has not destroyed.”5 Shall it be ignorance or attention that preserves beauty and produces moral acts?

I ask these questions not in skepticism but in hope. For I hope to understand my first set of questions rightly because I sense their importance for my second set of concerns. In these, I attempt what one of my teachers calls “thinking along” Craft’s good work in an effort to appreciate the depth of the art I have encountered in my own research on the loss of place.6 I remain interested in the moral capacity of art to name the placelessness that plagues so many of our global neighbors, and I seek Craft’s assistance in navigating what must follow after—namely, to be transformed from being people who care about place and placemaking to those who care about the place-less.

In this pursuit, I begin with Craft’s argument that placemaking in the “place” of society aims at “justice, diversity, inclusion, health, democracy” (174). She avers that these shape and communicate how we envision and understand place, then take form in our particular practices in our particular places. However, seeking to understand our current impasse on place-making practices (i.e., our immigration policies), I am left to wonder whether we simply possess incommensurate understandings of these aims or if some of us have disavowed them as our aims. Given my own social imaginary, it would seem to me that policies of family separations, the construction of border walls, and the encumbering of asylum seekers are practices that demonstrate we are not, in fact, aiming at justice, diversity, inclusion, health, and democracy. Have the proponents of these policies and practices abandoned these aims, or have the aims themselves failed to “communicate the variable imaginative frameworks for understanding place and placemaking in the arena of society” (174)?

It is here where I place my hope that Craft is right about art’s moral agency. Here I pray she is correct that in our “encounter[s]” with art, “we are opened up to mental reflection and often a change of heart, which shapes or transforms our vision of the world” (90). In my own encounters with the art of displacement, I witness the concrete realization of this trust in art’s ability to re-present the world to us. In these images and performances I see others joining her in the expectation that by imaginatively experiencing how others view the world, we may come to a more capacious vision of that same world and have our vision of our place transformed thereby.

While the moral force of this art is profound, the stakes of its current failure are quite lethal, for both human and nonhuman “others.”7 Between the time of this essay’s submission and its publication, the group No Border Wall will hold a ceremony entitled In Memoriam Rio Grande, where artists, musicians, and poets are invited to create works of art recognizing what may be lost with the planned expansion of border walls in the Rio Grande Valley.8 These losses include loss of “access to the river that gave life to our communities,” as well as community members’ lost homes and farms, the destruction of wildlife habitat, and the loss of lives as “more migrants and asylum seekers could be pushed into crossing through hostile desert areas where so many have died.”9 During In Memoriam community members and artists will process with their art toward its display on a common altar, listening to poetry and “singing songs of rivers and resistance.”10 The altar may be impermanent, and the meal afterward will center around tamales instead of unleavened bread, but surely this is one of the community liturgies held up by Craft (drawing not only on Jamie Smith but also on Nicholas Wolterstorff in later chapters)—one that by its repetition, its making and unmaking and remaking, hopes to produce new vision as well as moral action.

Other border liturgies have worked their power as well. In the fall of 2017, French artist JR hoisted a sixty-five-foot-tall image of a baby, “Kikito,”11 peering over the US/Mexico border fence at Tecate. The baby resides on the Mexico side, towering over the metal bars of the fence as if glancing over his crib railing. The artist documented the art by posting a photo showing two US border patrol guards watching the installation.12 His caption noting the “work in progress” simultaneously points to the art and to the khaki-clad agents who stand beholding the image and (hopefully) contemplating its meaning. The art makes its own multivalent meaning, but it is significant that JR relayed the message the baby’s mother expressed when approving his use of the image: “I hope this will help people see us differently than what they hear in the media, that they will stop taking us [sic] like criminals or rapists. . . . I hope in that image they won’t only see my kid. They will see us all.”13

One month later, JR staged a communal meal at that same wall,14 in the shadow of Kikito, with guests gathered at tables set on either side of the wall, merging at the fence and becoming a common table. Guests shared the same food and drink, with half the band on each country’s soil. The most striking visual of their communion was discernible only from an aerial view, as JR’s two tables bore a single image—the eyes of a “dreamer” peering up at us all.15 The image’s unity, as well as the performance of divided neighbors breaking bread across a barricaded border does the work Craft intends when she writes of art “shaping our vision, allowing us to see imaginatively through the act of literal seeing” (91). In his installation, JR beckons us to stare at the actual wall, but to behold it differently. A crib, not a cage. A curious infant, not a malicious invader. In his banquet and table image, JR undermines the reality of division with the deeper reality of communion, hospitality, and the beauty of neighbor love.16

The liturgy and communion being offered on either side of the border wall at The Border Church / La Iglesia Fronteriza are perhaps an even more profound example of Craft’s description of art as liturgy—an impermanent making and remaking that offers a visionary alternative to the steel bars and metal fences that stand between the worshipping community. Since 2011, a congregation of worshippers has gathered every Sunday from opposite sides of the fence at Friendship Park on the far western edge of the US-Mexico border, joining together in worship and Eucharist across a barricade—passing the Body and Blood through mesh, wire, and fencing.17 The literal form of their art can be seen in the simple cross painted on the fence itself, where the posts and crossbars of the behemoth barrier are transformed into an image of reconciliation on the very structure of separation. But more than this, the congregation’s shared confession, worship, and sacrament are an image that re-presents the world of the border to all of us, calling us to imagine how we might indwell that world differently, summoning us to life as one Body in the very presence of the machinery of fear and exclusion. In their own words, “Somehow, mysteriously the US-Mexico border wall is turned into the table of our Lord, a table at which all are welcome.”18

In the performance or production of art, we find not only an alternative or expression of a future hope, but—through the art itself—a summons to a renewed vision of the present.19 We sometimes discover this in lesser known artists like Sean T. Hawkey, who uses social media platforms to exhibit his portraits of Central American women from the “Migrant Caravan,” holding up their particular visages to our gaze, demanding we see their dignity anew.20 Innovative Sudanese artist Mohamed Marzoug organizes impromptu musical performances amongst protesters at demonstrations in Khartoum.21 Handing out everyday objects, he leads them in making music out of tambourines, stones tapped on light posts, and even their own clapping hands—inviting them to enact the possibility of newness even in the midst of the ordinary. The musical arts become a fitting form for would-be revolutionaries after the fall of a thirty-year dictatorship. For what is revolution but the capacity to look at present reality and imagine new possibilities? Even well-known artists like Yo-Yo Ma have staged public art exhibitions,22 bringing the sonorous beauty of Bach to the stark, unwelcoming border crossing. With performances at the two cities on either side of the international border, Ma created a connection through his music that belied the separations being perpetrated at the boundary in whose shadow he played.

If I have read her well, this hope of transformed vision may be precisely what we need to follow Craft’s summons to “make our spaces into places that will make us . . . more open to the strangers in our midst . . . and more just in our dealings with others in society” (232). Rightly understood, her work on the power of art may spur us to become not only people of placemaking, but those who make places for others. Not only people who nurture “homesteading” and “homecoming” for ourselves, but for those who may never be able to return home. Not only people who are capable of cultivating attention and attending to beauty, but those who are capable of sacrificial hospitality and the practice of neighbor love. Placemaking and the Arts, then, holds out more than a theological aesthetics of place. It offers us an image of redemption. Tolle lege.

What is my place in the world? It is a question that small children and teenagers and even the elderly ask themselves. Children ask this of their parents. Teenagers wonder this of their peers. The elderly, with their increasing physical and mental frailties, worry about their place in a world that rewards maximal utility. Without a sense of place in the world, we invariably feel disoriented. Feeling disoriented, we find ourselves becoming strangers to the earth beneath us and estranged from our own selves. As someone who spent his childhood in Guatemala, I have always struggled to find my place in the world. Although I feel deeply rooted in my home in Texas, and I cherish the southern hospitality that marks this part of the world, with its idiosyncratic sounds and tastes, I often feel bored and judgmental of this particular plot of earth. At worst, my neither-here-nor-there identity has caused me to feel displaced, or to borrow from Walker Percy’s “last self-help book,” a bit lost in the cosmos. This is why I am powerfully drawn to artists and to the arts.

For those of us who experience an ambiguous relationship to our place on earth, artists help us to see that, in fact, God is happily at work here, quietly making grace happen in unexpected ways, gently rebuking our stubborn refusal to see that salvation is occurring in this place—this street, this humidity, this church, this grocery store, these people, those people, my people. This is, for example, what the installation artist Craig Goodworth accomplished for the people of Phoenix, Arizona, in 2012. He took “misplaced” things and re-placed them in a sphere of meaning: Arizona corn grain from Casa Grande; leached water from the warehouse itself; Desert Durum wheat grains and the cornmeal from Arizona Grain; a donkey from Maricopa County; asphalt from nearby; steel rails from twenty yards outside the building. Put together, the materials told a story about Phoenix. Inviting his audience to touch the materials, to be near them, to smell them and to know them, was a way to help them to love their city, to become more deeply at home in it.

This, in short, is what Jennifer Craft aims to commend to her readers in Placemaking and the Arts, and it is a book that deserves a wide reading, not just among academics, but also with church leaders, community activists, high school teachers, entrepreneurs, homemakers, philanthropists, and lay believers of all sorts, all of whom would richly benefit from Craft’s book and, more crucially, represent the very people who possess the power to make her vision a concrete reality. There is no human being, no matter their nomadic or settler proclivities, who does not wish to know their place in the world. We have been divinely hard-wired, as Craft argues it, to discover our identity and calling by way of our emplacement. And it is the arts in particular, Craft suggests, that become suitable vehicles for cultivating a theological imagination and a distinctly Christian sense of place, “so that we may become people who better participate with Christ and his church to bring about the kingdom of God in our places” (2).

For reasons of space and personal interest, my review of Craft’s book will focus on chapter four, “Divine Presence and Sense of Place.” In this chapter Craft explores ways in which art “might help us participate more deeply and meaningfully in the corporate life of worship in the church by making fitting and hospitable places through which to deepen our relationships to one another, to the world, and to God” (124). Craft investigates, first, a biblical account of divine presence and community experience as it relates to place, with special emphasis on the garden of Eden, the tabernacle and temple narratives, and the life of the early church. From this biblical-theological account, she draws out several themes for a “contemporary liturgy of place that prioritizes vision, embodied action, and a sense of place in the act of worship as a way to discover God’s presence, cultivate community belonging, and encourage Christian mission through beauty” (124).

Craft offers several gifts to her readers. One gift is careful language and vivid phrases. She writes about the idea of “place as center” and “place as microcosm” (133). This, I find, is a helpful way to see how the individual place of a local church anywhere in the world can function as both a particular place, bearing witness to its singular character in creation and history, and a universal place, bearing witness to the redemptive work of God that all local congregations anywhere might recognize. This way of describing the place of ecclesial worship is generative for Christians today. In her words, “We are called to be both temple and temple builder, dwelling in God’s dwelling presence even as we communicate that presence out into the world, our own lives in community functioning as both center and microcosm of divine presence as witnessed in the work of the Holy Spirit, who enables our participation in the kingdom of God” (139).

Craft uses the language of “homesteading” and “homecoming” to describe our general human calling. She argues that the particular calling of artists, in christological and eschatological terms, is “to navigate the boundaries between homesteading and homecoming, allowing us to dwell in the interstices between contentment and longing, affirmation and challenge, contemplation and action, memory of the past and imagination of the future” (162). Our places of worship, she continues, “will be sites that are both rooted and missional, both grounded in the created world and anticipating the new creation” (151–52). As it relates to the work of artists, she adds, “In this way the arts cultivate a sense of belonging in our particular communities while highlighting the sojourning nature of those communities, creating in us a love of created places, but without necessitating our clinging to them in their current state” (154). This is refreshingly and unabashedly theological language.

Craft puts her cards on the table early on and invites her reader to accept or reject her theological premises—and there is certainly nothing wooly in her use of God talk. There is only a Niceno-Constantinopolitan assumption that to do right by the earth requires that we do right by the Maker of earth, whose name signals the good purposes for the earth. Said negatively, we will not find in Craft’s work any gossamer spirit-language, in search of a landing place that matters; nor will we find a panentheist’s hope for generic goodwill on earth, revolving around the idea of a free-floating divine agent who blows where it wills without any personological responsibility to the God of Israel or any ontological relation to the Second Person of the Trinity. There is only the Spirit of Christ who makes us “little temples” and “temple-builders,” agents of God’s shalom in our respective places in the world.

Here, also, there is no cosmic Christ floating two feet above the proverbial ground, God’s undifferentiated epidermis, or merely Another Name for Everything in its fullness, as Richard Rohr suggests in his recent book. Here there is only the God who has become scandalously incarnate in Christ Jesus, the enfleshed Temple presence of God, whose particular habitation on earth establishes conclusively our human responsibility to the earth and to the earth-reshaping, aesthetically inflected activities of artists. Craft writes, “In the incarnation of Jesus and the establishment of the church as the body of Christ, we see a decidedly theological emphasis on place and particularity, not just as reminders or symbols but also as significant sites of redemption and renewal” (138).

With this theological grounding in place, Craft highlights three general characteristics that, she believes, are central to the practices of worship as told in both creation and temple/church narratives (139–40): (1) delight in and discovery of beauty and God’s presence in the world “at least partially called forth in conjunction with artists’ creation of a beautiful context in which to respond to that presence”; (2) response to “God’s involvement within the world through communion with them and one another in liturgically practiced placemaking”; and (3) a kenotic outpouring of love in service and mission as an imitation of God’s own creational and incarnational involvement with his creatures. In layman’s terms, this is the “up, in, and out” trajectory of the arts in service of placemaking.

A particular strength of Craft’s book is her commitment to showing, and not just telling, how the arts enable particular worshiping communities to find their place in the world. In this fourth chapter, she includes case studies that feature the temporary works of art in the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, and in Queen’s Park Govanhill Parish Church on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland. Crafts shows us how Liverpool Cathedral in the United Kingdom has welcomed artists to express the risk of divine love, and how Holy Innocents Episcopal Church in Atlanta, Georgia, has employed local artists and artisans to make work that locates “the community in that particular place for liturgical practice, which microcosmically reflects the worship of the church universal” (160).

Craft concludes the chapter by highlighting four key ideas as they relate to divine presence and a sense of place: art engages us in the physicality of worship through which we know God and one another; art helps us feel a sense of belonging to a particular community; art invites us to active, hospitable response, which enables mission in the world; and art conveys an eschatological sense of home as it participates in both creative homesteading and redemptive homecoming for the church, looking forward to the new creation as practiced from within our own places and communities. She writes, “Art makes a place for us in the environment of worship so as to draw us out of ourselves and back into ourselves in liturgical refrain, enabling and anticipating that ever-steady and ever-new transforming presence of the Spirit in our lives together” (163).

Where Craft may need to do further work in order to strengthen her thesis is in relation to biblical theology, liturgical theology, the language of beauty, and a philosophy of art. A common, and legitimate, criticism of biblical scholars against systematic theologians is that we play fast and loose with the biblical text. We see patterns and principles, but we are reluctant to do the hard work of historical-critical analysis that might force us to reckon with the details that refuse to fit neatly into our grand ideas. Biblical scholars likewise chide us for assuming a degree of continuity between the two testaments that simply does not exist in any facile manner. Invariably, we assert continuity rather than argue for continuity. More precisely, we often fail to propose a theory of continuity that would inform why we carry over certain parts of the Old Testament into a vision of ecclesial life this side of the New Testament. As often as not, we cut and paste our way towards coherence. Craft leans heavily on the work of New Testament scholar Gregory Beale (justly so, I believe) in order to build a case for “temple building,” which she describes as “an ecclesiastical designation reminiscent of the placemaking or building activities identified in relation to the wilderness tabernacle as well as God’s own placemaking in the incarnation” (137). But she might wish to look to other scholarly guides, too.

A close reading of Scripture reveals two distinctive notions of temple: temple as personal locus for God’s presence and temple as cosmological witness to God’s shalom. The means by which God accomplishes shalom includes, for Israel, objects, artworks, buildings, and other physical media. While in Beale’s reading, the Jerusalem temple performs hefty theological work, reordering Israel’s relationship to the world by way of material-symbolical liturgical aids, his tentative remarks about New Testament worship seem to find these aids accidental rather than integral to the church’s formation. This, to my mind, is a defect in his argument. The point for Craft is this. To fully convince the reader, she needs to do more than restate Beale’s arguments; she needs to take his argument further or to amend it. She needs to go beyond assertions of linkages in “place” language between the two testaments. She needs to argue a biblical theology that reckons with both the continuity and discontinuity that obtains in the textual record.

Put otherwise, the Old Testament is full of theological engagement with place in general and with buildings in particular. The New Testament is no less interested in place and buildings, but its interest lies in the figurative, symbolic, or provisional nature of these physical things. This, for many Christians today, results in a positive disinterest in the theological importance of both artful places and ecclesiastical art. This, historically, accounts for divergent and frequently contested visions of faithful culture-making and place-making in the life of the church. On this front, Craft would do well to take advantage of the research of liturgical theologians. In her review of a biblical understanding of place, Craft includes the standard representatives of the literature: Levenson, Walton, Barker, Beale, Lane, Perrin, Bartholomew, Casey, et al. These are necessary interlocutors. But if Craft wishes to solidify her argument and to persuade a wider audience, she will need to engage the work of George Lathrop, Alexander Schmemann, Peter Leithart, and Jean-Jacques von Allmen, among others.

An additional concern relates to beauty. Craft makes no mention of beauty as a primary category in her introduction to the book, and yet it functions in a determinative role in each of her chapters. She asserts rather than argues for beauty as a defining characteristic of faithful placemaking with respect to the arts in worship. In chapter 4 she uses interchangeably the language of “delight” and “desire,” and she contends that the arts in worship become sites for the formation of desire for God by training people in the language of beauty. A quick survey of the Reformation era shows how Protestants generally took beauty in one direction (as an experience of delight), while Catholics generally took it in a different one (as an experience of desire), with substantial implications for how the arts entered into the liturgical context—or were withheld from that context, as the case may be. A review of the literature in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, moreover, reveals spirited debates about the necessary relation between the arts and beauty. If Craft wishes to keep beauty as a primary category, she will likely want to make her argument for beauty more explicit.

Finally, for a book that makes the arts central, it is unfortunate that she chooses to work with what she calls a functionalist sense of the arts. She writes, “The main concern of this book, of course, is not to present a cohesive philosophical art theory, but rather to explore the dialogical dimensions of art and place within a theological worldview. The multidimensional purposes and character of the arts will stand as a testament to the multidimensional character of the places in our life” (22). Naturally, there is only so much room to argue everything. Some things simply need to be assumed and the reader must be trusted to accept, or to reject, the given assumptions. But with a book that focuses on the arts, an answer of some kind must be given to the question, “How precisely do the arts form human beings?” A definition of the arts that is too general is at risk of being swapped out for something else—equally as interesting, or perhaps perceived to be more effective or important, with the result that the arts are relegated to their usual marginal status.

Far too often advocates of art in worship rush headlong into superlatives—Art is spiritual! It ushers the transcendent! It makes the invisible, visible! That may be so, and fine as far as it goes, but it begs the question: How might the “logic” or “singular powers” of visual art, in contrast, say, to music, form a people at worship? A painting, for instance, does not unfold over time like a song does. A linen banner does not expire in the way that a musical note does. And a cast-iron sculpture does not bend to the subjectivity of a particular audience as in the case of an anthem, which is sung one way by a professional choir and in a rather different manner by untrained folk. To convince her readers that the liturgical arts deepen our sense of place, Craft will need to show how specifically and uniquely the arts perform their formative work—neurologically, psychologically, somatically, affectively, imaginatively, socially or otherwise.

In her concluding chapter, Craft proposes six key dialectic features of art and place in light of their theological significance and interpretation (201–19): (1) physical and spiritual; (2) particular and universal; (3) individual and communal; (4) given and made; (5) beauty and usefulness; (6) contemplation and action. This is a tremendously helpful conceptual frame to perceive how the arts function in a liturgical context. It seems to me that Craft’s book could have begun with this framework and then traced the work of the arts in nature, home, church and society through these dialectical lines. It may, for instance, have helped the reader to understand more clearly the nature of the popular reaction to the burning of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris or the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee from the entry to Duke University Chapel in Durham. It may have helped readers to perceive how people in France and in North Carolina find their place in their world through the art of a Gothic roof or a stone sculpture, or the absence of one, in a way that calls “our attention to the physical reality around us, to its nature, its needs, and to its theological significance in the story of creation and redemption” (144).

I’ve found myself thinking a lot, lately, about the Trinity. And because I’m a Christian art historian, I’ve been seeing the faces of the Trinity a lot in different vectors of artistic production and interpretation. Of course theologians have long been working to articulate the natures of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, using both Scripture and spiritual experience as a guide. In so doing, they have begun to describe God himself in ways that are illuminating and life-giving. But I think they are also describing something else: by describing God, they describe the basic patterns of the universe that God created. Because more and more, for me, the character-archetypes of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit seem taxonomically explanatory of so many things—so many manifestations echoing down here into our created world. Viewed through this lens—the lens of the Father, Son, and Spirit taxonomy—Dr. Jennifer Craft’s book Placemaking in the Arts feels distinctively “Holy Spirit”-ish. I will explain.

Put briefly, the Father is the One toward whom everything ascends and points; he is the fount of Deep and Awesome Glory. The Son, meanwhile, is the One who was manifest in time and lived a historical life; he perfectly models the tactics necessary for navigating our journeys on the timeline. The Holy Spirit, finally, is the One who surrounds and nurtures and prods from behind, connecting and enveloping and giving us the necessary strength to (a) make it through the timeline, and then (b) dwell with the Godhead in ultimate Glory. As a Christian, I think these Trinitarian archetypes of Personhood are fundamental to the way everyone thinks, whether they know it or not, just as everyone is subject to the laws of physics, whether they know it or not. So I don’t feel it’s illegitimate to see “Father” tendencies, “Son” tendencies, and “Spirit” tendencies in approaches to the arts. (Art is, after all, a manifestation of proxy personhood. Or at least, that’s what I will argue in an upcoming book.)

Most academic art historians have traditionally taken what I will call a “Father” approach to the visual field. This is in large part because art historians—as historians—retrospectively survey centuries or even millennia of visual production and have to make value judgments about what is, or is not, worthy of consideration. The very exercise of “value judgment” is something like a “glory” judgment—it relies on unaccountable attraction to things deserving of canonicity that have stood the test of time due to some ineffable quality. The echo of this “Father” orientation in art-making and viewing is the aesthetic. That is the kind of art historian I am.

Increasingly, though, art historians are taking a more “Sonlike” approach to the visual field. That is, like many past theologians of the arts, they are looking for tactical models of good conduct in the products of artists. These models can be narrative (through figures acting out good behavior), propositional or doctrinal (through the straightforward inclusion of words or symbols), or, in a way, more formative, by means of leading participants through time-bound, morally-charged experiences. Theologians, pastors and arts ministers have always looked for good moral models in art. In today’s politically charged environment, meanwhile, everyone seems to be looking for good moral models (or, on the flip side, prophetic warnings). A new focus on art-activism has meant that secular historians and critics are increasingly seeking exemplary or prophetic content that reflects the political values of their communities.

Far less common is what I will call a “Paracletial” approach to the visual field—one emulating the special character of the Holy Spirit. The Paracletial approach is notably less assertive, less commoditizable (and thus less monetarily valuable), and less majestic or prestigious. It does not spread broad, magnificent shoulders and ask for your admiration. It does not model how to be or think in prophetic, clarion tones (nor, on the obverse, does it marshal empathy or guilt as a spur to better conduct). Instead, it wraps and supports. It affirms and welcomes. I would like to dub Craft’s approach in Placemaking and the Arts “Paracletial,” if the neologism isn’t too awkward. (At least, I think it’s a neologism since I can’t find it on Google.) The evangelist John’s “Paraclete” is an advocate (supporter), intercessor (connector), and all-around helper. That reminds me of the kind of work Craft’s book celebrates.

What is “Paracletial” art, or Holy Spirit art? It has something in common with what some critics have sneeringly called “mere decoration.” Decoration makes you feel good and comfortable and surrounded, but it does not accuse or challenge. Decoration is archetypally “feminine” (“fifties housewife” feminine) in both its nurturing character and its self-effacing willingness to get out of the way and let someone else shine. Decoration is the good woman behind every famous man. I think decoration is something like the “placemaking” Craft describes, but not completely. The “Paracletial” and the decorative overlap, to be sure, but they are not fundamentally the same. For the Paracletial is also a part of God, and is thus jealous for its own glory—a glory of a special kind. The Paracletial surrounds and prods, but it still demands to be looked at and celebrated for an intrinsic goodness that transcends mere usefulness or comfortableness.

So what is this special glory, maybe this more “small g” glory, that makes the Paracletial greater than “mere decoration” but also separate from Glorious Fatherness and Moral Sonship? How can we descry the lovable, dignified “personhood” of the Paracletial—and by extension, the Personhood of the Holy Spirit, the most poorly understood of the faces of God? I think Craft suggests a way. Early in the introduction to her book, Craft decries the “tendencies of the modern world to homogenize our sense of place . . . disconnect[ing] our personal sense of home from a theological model of hospitality” (3–4). The thrust, here, is toward acknowledging the preciousness of the places we’ve been given and to exercise good, generous stewardship. But there is a deeper dynamic. I think the words “homogenize” and “hospitality,” especially, are key. For me, they suggest that diversity (of which rootedness in place is a symbol and determinant) is necessary for true connectedness. We need the clear-eyed self-ownership that comes from rootedness to genuinely give of ourselves and consequently unite. Thus stewardship of place and a reaching out from place is fundamentally reconciling, like the Holy Spirit that calls on our behalf Abba, Father. Art that galvanizes space embodies a diffuse and whispering personhood that strengths each according to her own, and then bids consequent unfurling and connecting.

This makes “Paracletial” art the most paradoxical art, so it is appropriate that Craft culminates her book with dichotomies (e.g., given/made, individuality/community, contemplation/action—chapter 6). The “Paracletial,” as I have said, surrounds and nurtures while remaining somehow an object of contemplation. It is both in front of and behind, both peripheral and central. As a category for art, it aptly embraces new forms of performance, installation and interaction that are gaining prominence in the twenty-first century. It is therefore at once both deeply ancient and refreshingly current. A case in point: in his recent textbook from Prentice Hall, Contemporary Art: World Currents, leading contemporary art historian Terry Smith identifies trends very similar to the ones Craft highlights in her book, albeit from a secular point of view.

A good example of this dichotomous, distinctively contemporary, “Holy Spirit” artwork is the project by Keaton Wynn described in Craft’s chapter “Hospitality and Homemaking.” Wynn’s goal was to help inhabitants of China’s Gansu Province recognize the preciousness of their connection to the land. To that end, he orchestrated a community pottery-making endeavor that included first the harvesting of land (mud) for the making of pottery, then the visceral molding and firing process itself, and then, as a culmination, the experience of communally sharing a food-harvest presented in the handmade vessels. Here, the made objects (Wynn himself is a ceramicist) serve and surround, but they are also held up as foci of contemplation; the latter, in fact, is what makes them categorically “art” and not just kitchenware. And as actions for contemplation, the very practice of making and using the objects counted as “art” as well. Craft also mentions Brian Catling’s processional cross used in the liturgy at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. This object, which is meant to be carried and followed, activating space and facilitating connection and movement, is also meant to be contemplated in its form and substance—in the poignant, wincing harshness of its tortured lines.

“Paracletial” art, I have suggested, is a return to more ancient, unselfconscious forms of artmaking, but with a new awareness that allows celebration. In this, it also embraces more aptly than other kinds of art the traditionally feminine craft forms that have historically shaped the environments of tight-knight communities (thus Craft’s pertinent inclusion of works like Housetop, by Sue Willie Selzer, and 27,000 Breaths, by Marianne Lettieri, both of which evoke venerable textile traditions). Accordingly, as I have hinted, there is something subtly—or actually, not so subtly—feminist about Placemaking in the Arts. Practices and objects redolent of what has often been “women’s work” are granted a theological dignity heretofore less clearly spelled out.

***

But I have one final thought. As I think about art that humbly surrounds and prods and nurtures, art that is integrated into its environment in such a way that it both makes place and also helps model the eschatological kingdom of God in its texture and diversity, I find myself wishing that I wasn’t thinking of names. What do I mean by that? I mean, I guess, that when I think about a Chinese community intentionally harvesting both land and food to share, in mindfulness of that foundation and that gift, I do not want to think about a man named Keaton Wynn from Americus, Georgia. Or at least, I don’t want that name to be a neon sign above it all. I do not mean to single out Professor Wynn, who does compassionate, conscientious and beautiful work. Rather, I want to question a whole system that puts the artist front and center.

I think art is a beneficial spiritual technology, and I think its inventors and perpetuators are to be commended. But too often, in the art world, one’s inward gaze slips from the what to the who, so that the spiritual benefits of the technology are almost lost in the glare of a competing spotlight. There are many reasons for this: a long-standing romantic view of the artist as prophet or seer, reaching back as far as the Renaissance; a sincere desire to encourage creators whose field is tragically underfunded and unappreciated; and (less nobly) a commercial desire to cultivate “brand names” that will guarantee the value of big-ticket retail products. Whatever the cause, the mystique often accorded to artists is, on a deep level, off-putting—maybe it keeps audiences from taking ownership over the technology and using it according to their private lights. I think this helps account for why the “Paracletial” art Craft describes is not more widely embraced in Christian communities. Christians, as a matter of principle, do not wave their arms and take credit, yet in the art world this is de rigueur (heck, it’s demanded from the artist, even if she’s not so inclined). The clash in etiquettes can feel almost insurmountable.

I wonder: is there a way to cultivate more mystery around our placemaking and artmaking? Is there a kind of veiling we can achieve, a kind of delicacy, a kind of reckless casting of made things into communal space to be communally transformed? Is there a kind of letting go that can define the Christian artist—well, any artist—in this postmodern age? Can we recapture some of the bashful mystery of the medieval artisan who rarely signed his name? Maybe what is most needed is a community infrastructure that understands the uses and sources of art well enough to lift some of the burden from the artist’s shoulders. So much of the artist’s intimidating mystique (intimidating for those unfamiliar with art-world conventions) comes from the responsibility she bears to self-promote, explain and self-justify—to be an everything, an entrepreneur, a clairvoyant interpreter, a solitary sun, burning over-bright and over-short. Maybe the glamor we currently ascribe to “artmakers,” that guru-like glamor of hermetic self-reliance, needs to be prismatically fractured and shared.

***

And so the foregoing, I suppose, reveals one more paradox—the paradox the Apostle Paul tried to capture in Philippians 2, in his verse about a Jesus who is utterly downcast and who by means of that ignominy is lifted up. This is the paradox of Christian humility—of gaining your crown of glory by praying in closets and keeping your good deeds secret from all. “Paracletial” art diverges from glorious “Father” art and prescriptive “Son” art in its rediscovery of this glory-in-humility. I think at its core it calls for glory and labor shared. It is this kind of work that, as we habituate to it, might restore some balance both to a narcissistic art world and to a digital age cut off from the textures of life.

To begin with, I wish to thank Jennifer for writing such a marvelous book. Placemaking and the Arts is a theologically rich and stimulating work that has the added virtue of being beautifully written. There is nothing in Placemaking and the Arts that I wish to criticise or challenge. My approach to this forum then will be to explore, briefly, a couple of avenues of thought that Jennifer’s work opens up.

The first is an issue treated in the book that is of particular importance when contemplating the place of art in the creative and redemptive economy of God. It is the relation between divine and human action. It is easy enough to recognise that art may serve as witness to the divine economy, helping us to see what we might not otherwise have seen, and giving clearer access to the true nature of things. To what extent however is that witness made eloquent by the work of the Spirit without which it becomes no more than a material artifact, masterfully crafted perhaps, and admirable because of that, but unable by itself to count as a form of participation in the creative and redemptive work of God? That puts the matter bluntly; I do not mean, thereby, to denigrate the skill and genius of artists, but rather to encourage recognition of the fact that our participation in the work of redemption is always dependent on divine action, graciosuly embracing and enlivening our own.

Jennifer herself offers valuable insight here, raising the question, for instance, whether art itself can be redemptive. She understands the danger of supposing that “the arts do something in this world that has lasting significance for the divine-human relationship or for wider creational transformation” (222) and notes the warning offered by theologians such as Timothy Gorringe who “argues that art cannot by itself give us access to the divine, perform a prophetic role, or directly affect the primary concerns that face society today that are in need of redemption: war, famine, disease, environmental concerns, and displacement of people, among others.” Similar cautions are offered, Jennifer notes, by John Dixon, Patrick Sherry and Jeremy Begbie (see 223–24), the last of whom writes: “To speak of the redemptive possibilities of art is of course hazardous, lest we detract from the supremacy of the redemption wrought in Christ, and lest we suggest that Christ’s redemption is no more than an aesthetic reordering of material reality (when it is clearly much more than that).”1 The caution is surely apposite. We do not take God’s place as redemptive agents in the world. Yet Begbie goes on to suggest that we may nevertheless share in the redemptive activity of God through artistic endeavour. This is the view espoused by Jennifer herself. She writes:

If art, whether of non-Christian or Christian origins, is to be considered redemptive in any way, however, it must be God’s inspiration and action in the world that make it finally capable of of achieving that end. Human work might be said to participate or share in redemption, not achieve it in isolation. (227)

That human work, including the material products of artistic endeavour, “might be said to participate or share in redemption” is an affirmation that is grounded in the incarnation. The incarnation reveals, among other things, that the material world is suitable terrain for the bringing about of God’s redemptive purposes for the world. Matter is not antithetical to the work of the Spirit. Indeed the stuff of creation as a whole was deemed to be good in virtue of its having been called into being by the divine Word and having been given a form suitable for the realisation of the abundant life that God intends for his creatures. Two lines of inquiry are suggested by this affirmation of the goodness of creation that support and possibly extend further the argument set forth in Jennifer’s book. The first is penumatological and the second sacramental. I shall pursue each briefly and in a way, I hope, that will provide opportunity for Jennifer to offer her own further insight on the matter.

When we pursue the narrative of God’s creative activity further we discover the vital role played by the Spirit. It is indeed the Sprit who gives life. The first hint of that comes in Genesis 1:2. A wind [ruach] from God, swept over the face of the waters. The stirring of the divine ruach, the divine wind or spirit, portends the transformation of the formless void and of the darkness that envelops it. The work of creation is about to begin. The life-giving work of the Spirit becomes more explicit in Genesis 2:7: “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath [ruach/spirit] of life, and man became a living being.” That life depends on the presence of God’s Spirit thus becomes a staple of Jewish and Christian theology. The pslamist thus declares:

When you hide your face, they are dismayed;

When you take away their breath,

they die and return to their dust.

When you send forth your spirit, they are created;

And you renew the face of the ground. (Ps 104:29–30)

Giving life and renewing the face of the ground is creative and redemptive work and is dependent, so the psalmist affirms, on the giving of the [S]pirit. If we are to develop an account of our human work, including the work of artists, as a sharing in the redemptive work of Christ, then that account will, of theological necessity, be thoroughly pneumatological.

Jennifer is certainly aware of this. Linking incarnation with the work of the Spirit, she writes:

Just as the incarnation simultaneoulsy affirms and transforms creation, our artistry, as it finds meaning in the person and work of Christ, participates in this simultaneous affirmation and transformation.

An incarnational theology of art, therefore, is a “making significant” that draws on the possibilities of the physical world that God has already given to us, while seeking to extend them in a Spirit-led way. (214)

And further:

The Spirit occupies our imaginative space, working through that faculty to transform our hearts and minds in the love of God. As an act of love or affection, our imaginative work might be understood in its relationship to the Spirit’s inspiration and movement in the world, and acts such as human artistry and placemaking realized as imaginative extensions. The revelation that might be offered through these events will then be the result of divine action and inspiration, while still being thoroughly bound up with human response and responsibility. (221)

I should wish to make explicit what I think is probably implied here, namely, that if art is, in some cases, to be understood as a sharing in the redemptive work of Christ and as a medium of divine self-disclosure, then the agency of the Spirit will be required not just in the work’s production but also in its reception. Where a work of art becomes an instrument of divine self-disclosure, it will require that the Spirit gives eyes to see and ears to hear, just as is true for the reader of Scripture, that normative instance of inspired human activity.

If I am correct in understanding Jennifer’s intent to speak of the Spirit’s involvement not just in the fashioning but also in the reception of art, then we might also agree that the work of the Spirit in drawing the viewer into a greater awareness of the true, the good, and the beautiful, may sometimes exceed that intended by the artist herself. Meaning and significanace may emerge that was not envisaged by the artist but yet takes place in a way that honours rather than violates the concern an artist may have to shed light on the true nature of things. Every act of theological witness is like that, I suggest. In making our work an instrument of his own purposes, so to draw us more deeply into his truth and beauty and goodness, God gives to our work a vitality and eloquence that exceeds our own. This may be true, as Jennifer wishes to allow, even for those artists who have no Christian or religious sensibility or intention (see 226–27). Their work too may become an instrument in the hands of the God who wishes to draw all things into reconciled relationship with himself.

A second train of thought prompted by Jennifer’s contention that the work of artists, including the material products of their industry, “might be said to participate or share in redemption” involves consideration of the sacramentality of art. Without wishing to diminish at all the unique significance of baptism and eucharist in the life of the church, it may be fruitful nevertheless to consider whether that which gives them their sacramental character may also, on occasion, be found in art. Jennifer hints at the legitimacy of this enquiry, noting, for instance that “while understanding all art and craft as sacramental may lend additional theological difficulties, considering the eucharistic encounter helps us to imagine how Christ’s incarnational presence is experienced through other forms of human making in place” (101). Elsewhere, however, she advises that, “while sacrament is one category for thinking about these dynamics [of divine presence and absence], a theology of presence more generally, or rather a theology of presence more particularly, which lays hold of God’s presence in the world incarnationally, might better serve a placed theology of the arts” (228). She might be right, but I’ll take Jennifer’s acknowledgment here as permission to explore briefly what the category of sacrament might offer to our understanding of art as a medium of God’s presence. I hope too that my raising the issue might prompt further explanation from Jennifer herself of the possibilities and the limitations of sacramental language in reference to art.

The first thing to be noted is that the sacraments of baptism and eucharist take things said and done with material things—water, bread, and wine—to be the medium of God’s self-communicative presence. Explicitly in the eucharist, the Lord takes bread and says, “Take eat; this is my body,” and then over the cup of wine he says, “this is my blood of the covenant” (Matt 26:26, 28). These fruits of the earth and works of human hands, as the eucharistic liturgy of the New Roman missal puts it,2 become means by which God makes himself available to us. This does not give us licence to claim of all fruits of the earth and works of human hands, nor of all human artistry, that they may be sacramental means of God’s communicative presence. It does allow us to confirm the point made above, however, that the things of the world are not in virtue of their materiality antithetical to God’s use of them, should God so choose, as instruments of his presence. It is essential to observe that it is God’s choosing, rather than our own artistry, that is decisive here. Respecting this divine prerogative, however, our recognition that the fruits of the earth and works of human hands may mediate God’s presence ought to encourage heightened attentiveness to the revelatory possibilities of human artistry.

A second feature of the sacraments worthy of note in this context is that they are transformative ordinances. The transformation wrought through participation in the sacraments can take many forms, all of them attributable, of course, to the work of the Spirit. They may bind us more surely to the body of Christ, his people; they can release us once more from the bondage of guilt and sin; they may enable renewed obedience to the Lord’s instruction, “do this . . .” where “this” is the sacrificial giving of our own lives in service of God’s purposes for the world, and so on. Can art be a medium of such transformation? That it can be is a central claim of Jennifer’s book: the work of our hands, and of artists in particular, may be, she claims, a sharing in the redemptive and transformative work of Christ.

Let me conclude with an example of how this might work.3 I take my lead here from Jennifer’s advice that

a redemptive placemaking and adding of value will . . . be a localized placemaking that values the physical landscape and the role of beauty, that responds to the community’s needs, and that notices the particularities of lived experience there. This redemptive work seeks to produce in microcosm the presence of God as it will be in all of creation. (226)

At an exhibition hosted in 2005 by Calvin Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Paul Hebblethwaite presented photos of his installation Cardboard Church: Communion on the Los Angeles River. The church was installed in one of the large concrete drains that run through Los Angeles. It was prompted, Hebblethwaite tells us, by his discovery that the concrete drain was the dwelling place of “a pregnant lady and her AIDS-ridden boyfriend.”4 A stain of red wine soaks the cardboard church and extends over the floor of the concrete drain. The blood of the new covenant flows in this place where the lowly and the afflicted ones dwell.

To what extent might this installation be regarded as an instance of redemptive place-making? The installation derives clearly enough from a profound attentiveness to the needs of the community, here a “pregnant woman and her AIDS-ridden boyfriend,” and to the particularities of their lived experience in this place. The use of cardboard, so often the material with which the homeless attempt to fashion some shelter, reflects the artist’s attentiveness to the particularities of the lived experience in this place. I have no difficulty supposing that this attentiveness was Spirit-led. There is, as well, a sacramental character to the installation, explicitly so in the wine poured out in this place of dereliction. The redemptive work of placemaking, Jennifer advises, “seeks to produce in microcosm the presence of God as it will be in all of creation.” God’s presence “as it will be in all creation” is not realised in its fullness here yet, but the wine-drenched cardboard church bears witness to the form God’s presence takes in the person of Jesus. He is found among the outcast, the afflicted, and the broken. The cardboard church is a declaration that, as Hebblethwaite himself puts it, “God lives here too.”5

I do not know what the pregnant woman and her boyfriend made of it. If however, they recognised through the installation that someone had been attentive to their plight and if, further, they saw a connection between the wine-drenched church and the blood of Christ and were thus alerted to the possibility that God dwells with them, then we may say of this artistry that it is a sharing in the redemptive activity of God.