Painting God In Another World

Suddenly, as if the soul had returned to his body, Lu Shuo finally felt the earth, and his five senses gradually recovered, but his head was still a splitting headache.

In 17824, on an unmanned asteroid 670 million light-years away from the Milky Way, dark clouds were thundering and thundering. The dark clouds seemed to be pressed to the ground, and the thunder was so loud that there was no other sound in the world except thunder. If a practitioner passes by here at this moment, he will say, "This is the pervert who is robbing. It's so perverted.

In the passage to modernity we in the West have lost the ability to see things whole. We've closed our minds to all things transcendent and default to unbelief, and can't make sense of the persistent echoes of the voice of God that reverberate in our souls. In Rediscovering God's Grand Story, James Roseman picks up the strands of science, philosophy, history, the arts, and theology, and reweaves the tapestry to see a coherent story that makes the best sense of the world and provides real meaning and significance to our lives--God's Grand Myth. We see that the signals of transcendence that confound our culture of doubt are a universal language and vocabulary of the heart echoing the voice of God; and in the very Judeo-Christian story we so readily jettison is found the Author enabling us to see the world whole again. This essay tells why the story and promise of Christianity is so hard to hear today but won't go away. Could it be that, as T. S. Eliot wrote in the mid-twentieth century, "at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time"?

As the author of The Conservative Mind and other seminal books, Russell Kirk is usually thought of as one of the American conservative political movement’s most important progenitors. But as this collection demonstrates, Kirk was perhaps at his best as an essayist. This volume also confirms that Kirk’s was principally a literary and historical conservatism that refused to fit the irreducible complexity of human experience to the requirements of any ideological straitjacket. With The Essential Russell Kirk, literary critic George A. Panichas captures the breadth and depth of Kirk’s intellectual project by gathering together forty-four of the most masterful of Kirk’s essays, along with a unique chronology told in Kirk’s own words and a substantial introduction that articulates the deep humanism that animated Kirk’s philosophy. The result is a carefully assembled volume that gives us a fuller picture of an extraordinary man and writer, one whose labors had, and continue to have, remarkable repercussions on the American literary and political landscape.

For the past half century, Maurice Blanchot has been an extraordinarily influential figure on the French literary and cultural scene. He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. This collection of 29 critical essays and reviews on art, politics, literature, and philosophy documents the wide range of Blanchot's interests, from the enigmatic paintings in the Lascaux caves to the atomic era. Essays are devoted to works of fiction (Louis-René des Forêts, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Laporte, Marguerite Duras), to autobiographies or testimonies (Michel Leiris, Robert Antelme, André Gorz, Franz Kafka), or to authors who are more than ever contemporary (Jean Paulhan, Albert Camus). Several essays focus on questions of Judaism, as expressed in the works of Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Buber. Among the other topics covered are André Malraux's "imaginary museum," the Pléiade Encyclopedia project of Raymond Queneau, paperback publishing, the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Benjamin's "Task of the Translator," Marx and communism, writings on the Holocaust, and the difference between art and writing. The book concludes with an eloquent invocation to friendship on the occasion of the death of Georges Bataille.

The Reverend Howard Finster (1916–2001) was called the "backwoods William Blake" and the "Andy Warhol of the South," and he is considered the godfather of contemporary American folk and visionary art. This book is the first interpretive analysis of the intertwined artistic and religious significance of Finster’s work within the context of the American "outsider art" tradition. Finster began preaching as a teenager in the South in the 1930s. But it was not until he received a revelation from God at the age of sixty that he began to make sacred art. A modern-day Noah who saw his art as a religious crusade to save the world before it was too late, Finster worked around the clock, often subsisting on a diet of peanut butter and instant coffee. He spent the last years of his life feverishly creating his environmental artwork called Paradise Garden and what would ultimately number almost fifty thousand works of "bad and nasty art." This was visionary work that obsessively combined images and text and featured apocalyptic biblical imagery, flying saucers from outer space, and popular cultural icons such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Henry Ford, Mona Lisa, and George Washington. In the 1980s and 90s, he developed cult celebrity status, and he appeared in the Venice Biennale and on the Tonight Show. His work graced the album covers of bands such as R.E.M. and Talking Heads. This book explores the life and religious-artistic significance of Finster and his work from the personal perspective of religion scholar Norman Girardot, friend to Finster and his family during the later years of the artist’s life.