This week, pastor and author Claude Atcho joins the Artistic Vision to talk with Gary and Alex about the formative power of literature with a brief conversation on hip hop and Kendrick Lamar.

Claude resides in Charlottesville, VA where he lives with his family and serves as a pastor of Church of the Resurrection. In addition to his preaching and pastoral work, Claude speaks and writes about literature, film, music, and culture from a theological perspective at churches, conferences, and universities.

His writing has been featured in Christianity Today, The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, Think Christian, Christ and Pop Culture, Living Church, and The Gospel Coalition. His writing often lives at the intersection of theology, culture, and African American experience. He is the author of Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just (Brazos 2022).

The Artistic Vision
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Have you ever wondered what you’re supposed to be looking at when you look at art? What are you supposed to do when you enter a gallery? Elissa Yukiko Weichbort joins the Artistic Vision Podcast today to help Christians look and think about art.

Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt (PhD, Washington University in St. Louis) is associate professor of art and art history at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. As a biracial Japanese-white woman, she has navigated the joys and tensions of a hybrid identity. Weichbrodt has published on topics ranging from contemporary Black photographers to the patronage of Hawaiian landscape paintings to documentary photographs of Japanese Americans during World War II. She also enjoys writing for general audiences on the intersection of art history, politics, and pop culture.

The Artistic Vision
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Today, we have our friend Taylor Worley on the show to talk about weird contemporary art and how Christians can approach it.

Taylor Worley is the Visiting Associate Professor of Art History at Wheaton College in Illinois. In 2021, he was awarded a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust for a project titled “Thinking About Thinking: Conceptual Art in the Contemplative Tradition.” Dr. Worley served as the Visiting Associate Professor of Faith and Culture and the Managing Director of Trinity International University’s Center for Transformational Churches. In 2010, Worley was awarded his Ph.D. in Theology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He received an M.Div. from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2004 and a B.A. in Christian Studies from Union University in 2001.

The Artistic Vision
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Today’s episode of The Artistic Vision features Erin Shaw who shares her artistic vision and the role of symbolism in her art. Erin Shaw is a painter of borderlands, the spaces between worlds. As a visual storyteller, the child of an Oklahoma farm, Shaw tills the rich soil of dichotomy through her masterful uses of color, iconography, and story. As a Chickasaw-Choctaw artist, she creates in a state of tension, suspended between two worlds where both solemnity and humor pervade her art.

The Artistic Vision
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Join Gary and Alex on the Artistic Vision for this special end of 2024 compilation. At the end of each episode we give our guests the last word by asking, "what would you say to Artists who call themselves Christian?" Their words of wisdom are a treasure every week, and we've compiled them all into one episode! Listen in to these artist theologians.

The Artistic Vision
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In today’s conversation, Natalie Carnes joins "The Artistic Vision" to share about her calling as a constructive theologian, the theological vision of beauty from Gregory of Nyssa, and how the cross of Christ reinterprets beauty.

Natalie Carnes
Dr. Carnes trained at Harvard, University of Chicago, and Duke before coming to Baylor, where she is Professor of Theology in the Religion Department, Affiliate faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Director of the Baylor Initiative in Christianity and the Arts. Among Professor Carnes’s scholarship are four books, including Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa, Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia, and Motherhood: A Confession. Her fourth and most recent book, Attunement: The Art and Politics of Feminist Theology reflects on the entanglement of aesthetics, politics, and theology to suggest a path forward by which feminist theology might transform Christian theological discourse.

The Artistic Vision
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Wes Vander Lugt graciously joins us on The Artistic Vision today. Full disclosure: this was the first interview we did, so you’ll see some real amateurs in action. We’re floundering; Dr. Vander Lugt is great. We talk about art, agriculture, his work at Gordon Conwell, and his new book, Beauty as Oxygen.

Wesley Vander Lugt
Wes currently works as the Acting Director of the Leighton Ford Center for Theology, the Arts, and Gospel Witness and Adjunct Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Charlotte. He is also the Co-Founder of Kinship Plot, a community of learning and practice imagining and embodying resonant relationships of every kind. Wes holds a PhD in Theology, Imagination, and the Arts from the University of St Andrews and enjoys writing and speaking on a variety of topics including beauty, spiritual formation and the arts, discipleship in the theodrama, slow faith, pastoral ministry, kinship, and creativity. His publications include Living Theodrama: Reimagining Theological Ethics (Routledge, 2014), Theatrical Theology: Explorations in Performing the Faith (Cascade, 2014), and Beauty is Oxygen: Finding a Faith that Breathes (Eerdmans, 2024).

The Artistic Vision
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Jessica Hooten Wilson joins Gary and Alex today on The Artistic Vision to talk about art, creativity, and especially one of our favorites: Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor’s literary theory is central to our understanding of the artistic vision, and Dr. Hooten Wilson sheds light on how that vision could be beneficial for you.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University. She is the author of several books, most recently Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress. Her book Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov received a 2018 Christianity Today book of the year in arts and culture award and The Scandal of Holiness received a 2022 Award of Merit. Most recently, she completed the unfinished novel of Flannery O’Connor called Why Do the Heathens Rage.

The Artistic Vision
Find the book HERE!