to the dance of life
This is the third segment of my interview with Dr. Glenn Kreider,
professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, about art and Christianity.
In this part, we talk about facing the evilness in this world and
bringing in the hope of the day when God will set everything right.
And we talk for a moment about Sweeney Todd, my favorite musical!
The podcast runs under 6 minutes.
This is the second part of my interview with Dr. Glenn Kreider, a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary. The interview is about beauty and sentimentality, and this segment looks specifically at the cross and resurrection.
The video runs about 5 minutes.
Related quotes from "Beauty, Sentimentality, and the Arts," an essay by Jeremy Begbie in The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts:
"In a nutshell, Christian sentimentalism arises from a premature grasp for Easter morning, a refusal to follow the three days of Easter as three days in an irreversible sequence of victory over evil" (p. 61).
"Easter does of course throw its light on the ‘renting’ of Friday (to use Yeats’s word), but not a soothing glow so much as a white light that exposes the rupture between Creator and creature, the depths to which the human creature has sunk and the depths to which God’s love is prepared to reach" (p. 62).
"This is emphatically not to say that the crucifixion as an event of torture and death is really beautiful and not ugly, if only we would change our perspective. That would be gross sentimentality (and, of course, opens the door to sadism or sadomasochism). But it is to say that in and through this particular torture, crucifixion and death, God’s love is displayed at its most potent" (p.63).
You can see part one of the interview here.
A month or so ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing three professors at Dallas Theological Seminary who’d influenced me.
Dr. Glenn Kreider was one of them.
I only had Dr. Kreider for one class, but in that class, he raised questions that made me think differently. Incidentally, Dr. Kreider introduced me to Chagall’s White Crucifixion. Dr. Kreider used art in his teachings and allowed me to write songs instead of papers.
I broke up the interview into a few parts. This is part one. We talk about how Dr. Kreider came to realize the importance of art and the dangers of sentimentality.
This podcast runs approximately five minutes.
I tell tales--tall ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones. Some call it compulsive lying. I call it writing.
