God is Finished with Detroit

At last! Another installment of the evangelical art and kitch series!  Today I came across the photographs of freelance writer and artist James D. Griffioen.  Griffioen has an excellent spread on Detroit, the ultimate urban wasteland-turned-Arcadia.
I focus on the retro bumper sticker:  “Be Patient:  God is not Done Yet.”  I’ve seen many bad evangelical bumper [...]

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The Great I AM

After a long sabbatical, the evangelical art critic is back!  Plans are brewing for a full-scale analysis of evangelical kitsch.  But for now, I’ve been thinking about the scene in Exodus 3, where YHWH tells Moses that he must go to Pharaoh and demand to him that he let the Israelites go from bondage to [...]

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Evangelical Pastoral Bliss

In the age of Adobe Photoshop, artists and entrepreneurs can make the most pedestrian of connections between faith, feedom, politics, and God’s sovereign plan, all the well-worn motifs of evangelical devotional art. Consider the spate of pastoral panaceas that surfaced just after the September 11, 2001 attacks on America’s freedom. Each of these [...]

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Evangelical Art: Psalm 139

I’ve decided to rip off a blog post genre from the popular blog Purgatorio, a nearly exhaustive documentation on the pathology of evangelical media and kitsch.  This blog makes light of church signs, testamints, and other sanctified paraphernalia, but my favorite of its recurring features is “art critic,” a forum that invites reflections on evangelical [...]

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