Quotes From The Conference

Two friends and I recently attended the Festival of Faith and Music at Calvin College in Michigan. Below are some pertinant quotes from many of the speakers, if you're interested.

Emmylou Harris:

"Style" is a product of your limitations. You make a song your own by working with what you've been given.
It's better to record a really good song written by someone else than a mediocre song you've written yourself.

Lauren Winner:

"The arts" as a two-word phrase is as intimidating as anything besides "I do."

When do people who don't go to church sing?

Each of us is called to portray the image of God, and God is a creator.

Advertising is our "big art," which is "art for the sake of selling something." This has infected the Church.

Is the goal of art to be pretty, or to tell the truth?

David Dark:

There is madness at work when we think what God is giving us is merely spiritual, separate from the everyday.

"Apocalypse" describes that which is "redemptively unsettling."

"Secular" might work as a marketing tool, but it suggests terrain not belonging to, or not interesting to God.

If it's truthful, it's gospel. There is no truth out there that is the devil's. All goodness, truth and beauty is the Lord's.

Sufjan Stevens:

A Christian does not fix himself; he is fixed -- it's a passive form because it has little to do with our exertions but with the relievement of our exertions by God.

"Relevance" is guided by the desperate goals of Ego. It's an embarrassing goal. "Relevant" art is bad art. Christians -- contemplate irrelevance. Just carry the cross -- the real work we do is death, so we can be born into the Kingdom.

Steven Stockman:

We can't just be light. We must be salt -- we must be "on the meat."

Grace defies logic and reason and upends kharma (the rule that what you do will come back to you). We'd be in big trouble if kharma was our judge. Grace interupts kharma and smashes the pavement of the status quo.

Grace isn't the entrance to the Kingdom; it is the Kingdom.

Quotes from others referenced at the conference:

Peter Case: "A songwriter is a magpie -- a collector. You grab little things to make a nest. You collect good lines and string them together.

Harold Bloom: "Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the masses. It's the poetry of the masses -- the good and the bad.

Allan Ginsberg: "A prophet is someone who tells the truth all the time."

Flannery O' Connor: "Christianity is not a warm, fuzzy blanket. It's a cross."

Madeline L'Engle: "If it's true, it's Christian."