Bishop Tom Wright on Redeeming the Arts

“The church should reawaken its hunger for beauty at every level. This is essential and urgent. It is central to Christian living that we should celebrate the goodness of creation, ponder its present brokenness, and, insofar as we can, celebrate in advance the healing of the world, the new creation itself. Art, music, literature, dance, theater, and many other expressions of human delight and wisdom, can all be explored in new ways... The arts are not the pretty but irrelevant bits around the border of reality. They are highways into the center of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way. The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions. But the present world is designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold - yet if you’d never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldnÆt believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed. From Simply Christian.”