a fine statue of the madonna at Agnes Scott

I enjoy finding art in odd places. This sculpture of the Madonna is tucked in the back of the art building, under some trees. I'm embarrassed that I don't know if you clean granite or let it develop a patina of pollution. I think that the marble statues of Rome and Athens have the pollution cleansed off. Still this is a good piece of work. Leo Steinberg, a famous art historian at U Penn wrote a book called the Sexuality of Jesus Christ in Renaissance art and modern oblivion. In this book he wrote about how important for an understanding of the incarnation that Jesus' penis be displayed. This sculpture makes me think of that work - a wonderful work and I wish that I had a copy of it. Our library at Columbia should have it, but the development of theology in terms of iconography and the history of art is ignored. There's a little bit - acquired haphazardly through gifts mostly. Last summer when Catherine Kapekian gave a seminar on art in the Church and worship, I had some hope, but now the topic seems lost. Still what do I know. I gladly encourage anyone who works to bring art and music into the conversation of theological and spiritual development in a central way - not in terms of mimesis, illustration, or program, but as disciplines that allow a unique approach to God, where the text is the image. It takes some training in iconography, in symbols, a willingness to be open to poetic and allusional modes of dialog, taking some of the privilege away from the verbal and written. As I read in an issue of Journal of New Testament Studies, it is important to recall that the original message of the gospel was not written but spoken, and that the word was performative: both speaker and audience negotiating the word's meaning, dependent on each other. Here on Agnes Scott's campus is a performative word, that Christ was incarnate as any other baby, frail as any other male, and that Mary was like any other woman, any other mother, and that God's strength is displayed for humans through God as human in weakness and cruciformity, and it is this life and cruciformity that we are called to enter into and participate in.