How to Discourage Christian Artists

I suspect there are many followers of Christ who are called to the arts (they may not believe they are qualified to be labeled Christian artists) who feel out of place in the church or maybe at home or maybe everywhere. In this post, Philip Ryken lists many reasons artists feel uneasy in their churches. He says, “…Christians called to draw, paint, sculpt, sing, act, dance, and play music have extraordinary opportunities to honor God in their daily work and to bear witness to the grace, beauty, and truth of the gospel.”

We may be discouraged by other believers who commodify all art or praise cheap or bad art regularly. Some never offer to pay for the artistic work they want, but they also praise successful artists as if material success validates their artistic call. I’ve felt the tension of thinking of art only in terms of evangelism or pre-evangelism. But to requote N.T. Wright, artists “have a vocation to re-imagine and re-express the beauty of God, to lift our sights and change our vision of reality.” I want to climb that ladder, but I fear I will never leave the ground.

Tivoli report 2013



John Chadwell of Skjaldborg lectures on Viking combat.

I’m happy to report that, to the best of my knowledge, I made it to Elk Horn, Iowa for the Tivoli Fest and returned undamaged. That also goes for Mrs. Hermanson, my Chevy Tracker. The town of Elk Horn is located in southwest Iowa, and hasn’t moved any closer since the last time I was there (I checked), but I made it.

The Tivoli Fest, like so many celebrations this past weekend, was marred by the Bergen-like weather we’ve been having on the Great Plains. But the rain held off most of Saturday, which is the main day. I sold and signed books in the Danish Windmill Museum gift shop for about an hour and a half, and then retired to the Viking encampment (pretty small this year, alas) where most of the other Vikings (the Skjaldborg group) put on a combat show (pictured above).

Friday and Saturday nights I stayed in a nearby town with Ian and Buffy Barrs and their family. The Barrs are L’Abri people, and we sat up until 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning having one of those long, discursive conversations one associates with one’s college years (considerably more recent for them than for me). It was an experience of discovering sudden good friends of the sort that happens all too rarely in life. I’m richer for it. Saturday night we cut it off merely at midnight.

Saturday brought more rain and fewer visitors, but I actually sold more books, putting in all my time at the museum gift shop.

On the way home I spent Sunday night at my brother’s house in northeast Iowa.

Thanks to everyone who invited me and extended themselves for me (particularly Lisa Steen Riggs of the Windmill Museum). And to anyone who prayed for Mrs. Hermanson to hold up.

True Story

I just pulled up something I wrote in 2002 and thought I’d share it with you. It’s true. I did not make this up.

My co-worker was home alone when she found a large spider on a pile of towels. She smacked it repeatedly with a fly swatter. screaming all the while, but afraid that it was only stunned, she scooped it up in the towels, dropped them on the driveway, and whacked it several more times, again screaming the whole time.

Later, she overheard her husband asking her son about the spider in the driveway, assuming he had run over it in his car a few minutes prior.

“Oh, that big, brown thing?” her son exclaimed. “It was huge! I couldn’t believe it! Good thing Mom didn’t see it.”

Dallas Willard: Conscious of Real Life

“For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (1 Thessalonians 4:14).

Tom Nelson wrote on May 8 about the life and death of Dallas Willard. He quoted him, in reflection on this verse, “The difference is simply a matter of what we are conscious of. In fact, at ‘physical’ death we become conscious and enjoy a richness of experience we have never known before.”

Not that this world isn’t real, as some say, but it is like an illusionist, distracting us with the inconsequential so that we miss the most important things. At death, we see through it all.

Poet Christian Wiman's Next Step

The editor of Poetry magazine is moving on. Tom Bartlett writes:

He’s not abandoning poetry—he’s not sure he could ever do that… This June he’s leaving his plum poetry gig to become a senior lecturer of religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and the Yale Divinity School, a job that was offered to him a couple of years after he lectured at the institute. “My life has been aiming at this,” he says. “It seems to me incredibly exciting but also a necessary thing for me to put my faith more on the line on a daily basis.”

I’ve been thinking about that myself lately.

Merlin's Blade, by Robert Treskillard

Full disclosure: Author Robert Treskillard is an internet friend of mine, and I got my review copy free.



You’d think it would be hard to do a fresh take on Merlin and the Arthur saga, but Robert Treskillard delivers a story that’s quite original in Merlin’s Blade, throwing out parts of the traditional tale, altering others, but hewing close enough to the main points to satisfy most enthusiasts, I think.

My review has to be mixed. I found the story creative and compelling, and the characters – mostly – well developed and interesting. The execution of the narrative, however showed a number of weaknesses.

We meet Treskillard’s Merlin as a young man, the son of a village blacksmith, nearly blinded in a wolf attack (wolves keep trying to kill him, for reasons only hinted at), but able to get around fairly well in his familiar environs. A strange rectangular stone, originally a meteor, is brought forth by a group of Druids, bent on reviving the old religion among the Christian Britons. Merlin finds himself, along with his friends from a nearby monastery, drawn into a political conflict, not only between Christians and heathens, but between various chieftains carrying old grudges. He falls in love with the local magistrate’s daughter and joins the high king’s court as an apprentice bard, but old secrets threaten his life, his family, and his faith itself.

I enjoyed the story – indeed, I was reading compulsively by the end – but the writing got in the way too often. Author Treskillard hasn’t mastered his wordsmithing. He blends modern slang and antique diction, to sometimes jarring effect (he also doesn’t know how to use the “-eth” suffix, on the one occasion he attempts it). People do and say things now and then that don’t feel in character, but seem forced for the sake of a plot point or exposition. There are also movie tropes present which bother me, but probably won’t bother others – swords always scrape on metal when drawn (they don’t usually do that. Most sheaths were leather, and metal furniture was on the outside). Swords are worn on the back (generally impractical and anachronistic).

The best historical detail in the book involves a description of swordsmithing, something the author knows from experience and dramatizes with authority.

I think less critical readers (this book is aimed at young adults) will not pick as many nits with Merlin’s Blade as I did. Generally recommended. Very little objectionable content.

Two Sides to Pornography

We usually talk about pornography, if we talk at all, this way: “To be honest, I thought my addiction would go away with marriage, thought I had been prepared for the strong pull of lust and pornography by a four-month fast from my personal computer…” (That’s just part one of a three part take on porn’s destruction of a marriage.)

But we should also talk about it this way: “A growing body of evidence suggests that pornography fuels demand for prostitutes—and therefore, human sex trafficking victims, who often end up ensnared in both trades.” Not only that, many people making this stuff are in bondage themselves, forced to continue being exploited by all manner of manipulation while inspiring the exploitation of others.

Of course, this is all free speech, isn’t it? We are all just a bunch of healthy libertines, aren’t we, entertaining ourselves like intelligent adults, shunning the poisonous ideas of morals, shame, interdependence, selflessness, personhood, encouragement, hope, and most of all, love?

On the Viking road



Tivoli Fest, 2009.

I expect I’ll be posting tomorrow, but I’ll just mention here that I’ll be on the road and incommunicado on Friday. Once again it’s time for the Tivoli Fest in Elk Horn, Iowa, and I’m planning to drive down.

Hadn’t actually planned to. Nobody else in my Viking group is able to go this year, which means nobody’s going down from here with a vehicle large enough to carry a tent for me (Mrs. Hermanson, my ancient Chevy Tracker, doesn’t have the capacity). But I had a special invitation from a festival honcho, and felt guilty about it. Then I learned from a friend who lives in the area that he and his wife would be happy to put me up, so it seemed the thing to do. Assuming Mrs. Hermanson makes the trip, an increasingly questionable proposition at her age.

If you’re in the area, stop in. If you don’t find me in the Viking encampment, or in the Danish Windmill Museum gift shop, I’ll probably be sitting in an auto repair shop somewhere in Iowa.