St. Luke's Attic

The book in question, filled with wit, insight, wisdom, practical advice, and also the stuff I wrote!

My friend, Ned Bustard has a new book out entitled Teaching Beauty and your working boy has a chapter in it. My part of it is pretty much the last chapter, but still…

I wrote the chapter called “Art and Charity”. This does not mean that you should donate all of your work for free. It means “charity” in the sense of love or in the sense of kidness. To sum up in a very simplified way, I mean that we should extend charity to artists and attempt to engage their work even if we don’t initially care for it. The crux of my argument is that we are all made Imago dei – in the image of God – and that we want to make things. Insofar as we are imitaing God in creating, you should be charitible to artists in giving their work a fair shake. You may give the artist in question a fair hearing and still decide the work is crap. That’s fine. At least you gave it a shot!

That’s not all there is, I tell entertaining anecdotes, recount thrilling accounts of art history, and make wild leaps of logic. I also use the occasional Oxford comma. For all I know, you hate my work and you’re just here out of a sense of masochism. But thanks for giving me a fair hearing! Get the book, read it, it’s good!