Appreciating the Arts

Kasey Olander: 

Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture to demonstrate the relevance of theology to everyday life. I'm Kasey Olander. I'm the web content specialist here at the Hendrick Center, Dallas Theological Seminary, and I'm grateful that you've joined us for our topic today. We're going to be discussing the arts, and I'm eager to delve into it with these two gentlemen that we have here. Our first guest is Dr. Neil Coulter, senior writer and editor of DTS Magazine, and adjunct professor in Media Arts and Worship at DTS. Neil, thanks for being here. 

Neil Coulter: 

Thank you, Kasey. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, our other guest is Todd Agnew. He's the department chair of the Media Arts and Worship Department here at DTS. Todd, thanks for being here. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Thanks for having me. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah. Well, I will start off by saying that this is sort of a sequel or I don't know what comes after a sequel, but a follow-up episode to an episode that we did called, Why Christians Care About Art and Beauty, is episode number 596. We released it originally in March of 2024, and that conversation was so rich that I was like, "Well, we really need to further explore this." It was with Neil Coulter and Brian Chan and we talked about those two topics, which really, I mean, are their own topics in their own right. And so you can also watch Beholding Beauty with Dr. Brian Chan, which we released originally in January of 2025. And so this episode now that beauty has been further explored, we're going to explore more of the artistic dimension, the artist side. And so to start off, Todd, I'll probably start with you, but could each of you tell us what's your experience with the arts? How did you start reflecting on it and your engagement with the arts? 

Todd  Agnew: 

Yeah, absolutely. So music has always been my world. I love all kinds of art, but music is absolutely my field. I like to draw, I like to write, and I'm terrible at all of it, but there's still some benefit to doing it I think. So I grew up in church and so naturally went into the Christian music world and the part I fell in love with was leading worship. And so I got the opportunity to do that and then continued to get opportunities. 

And so I've lived in that world for a long time now, and I reached a point in my career where I had gotten to do the touring and the radio and the kind of crazy side of it and really felt God bring me to a turning point of saying, "Hey, you can continue to chase that, or you can start to train the next generation people that are going to do that." And that's what led me here. And so now we're having those conversations and partially passing on what I've learned, but also starting to just, "Hey, let's have these conversations about the arts and not just me and my specialty, but in general, what does this look like for the church and for believers?" And it's been a wonderful season. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, that's awesome. I like that you highlighted, one, different facets of the arts in addition to drawing, but writing and music and different things. But I also like that you said humbly that you're not very good at them. So I want to come back to that because a lot of times people only enjoy things that they're good at. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Right. I'm glad we're going to come back to something I'm bad at. That's going to be awesome. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, you're welcome. Neil, what about you? 

Neil Coulter: 

My background is also in music. I went to college as a saxophone performance major, so I'm a wind player, saxophonist specifically. And during those four years of college, I shifted from performance and really found a love for the history and the theory aspect of the study of music. And that took me to graduate work in ethnomusicology where I continued to fall in love with all those aspects as well as the cultural aspect of how music is a communicative tool within cultures and how that changes from one culture to the next. 

That ended up taking me and my family to overseas with Wycliffe Bible Translators where we worked in Papua New Guinea for 12 years working with local communities that for the most part were in the midst of a Bible translation project and we were engaging with those communities to help them write new songs and just bring their local art forms into their new engagement with the scriptures as they were being translated, which was a wonderful, wonderful ministry. And we just loved connecting with people in that way. And then we were called back to the US to do teaching in higher education, and that has led me to DTS. 

Kasey Olander: 

And we're grateful for that. But that is so valuable. The global perspective that you're bringing is not just like, "I've lived in this one place my whole life," but you've gotten to see different dimensions of the arts in different cultures. So now that we've alluded to it and we talked about how each of these men are musicians, but what all should we think of when we think of the arts? What all does that encompass? 

Neil Coulter: 

Oh, boy. Everybody's looking at me. This is a complicated question that really we could take the whole time just unpacking that because when we say art or the arts, there is not a single universal objective definition of what that is. It's a perception and it's a cognitive framework that we apply to what we see and what we encounter. So in every society, in every community, what people regard as art might be different or they might not regard anything as art. So it's a category and where I grew up, my background in America, we separate all sorts of things into little tiny categories. And so we have categories for the arts, and then we have categories for specific kinds of arts and categories for genres within those categories of arts. 

So we like putting things in small boxes where other communities might not see what they're doing in those categories as art or non-art. They might... When I travel around the world, I see things that my perception recognizes as artistry, but to the people who are doing it, it may be everyday mundane functional object or it may be a ritual object. They're not separating it out into the same categories. And so it's complicated to say what is art or what are the arts, because it really does differ from place to place. Overall, I would say that the arts are intentional communicative acts of sharing something with an audience with another person. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Yeah, no, that's great because that is the confusing thing about art is that being an artist and being an academic, which means I'm familiar with the arts and I like to define things that it's hard for me to put in a sentence, "Hey, this is what art is," and yet if I say art or the arts to anybody, to a five-year-old kid, they know exactly what we're talking about. It's this weird concept that people understand, but it's hard to build the box around it, which artists probably kind of like that. But at its core, I think it's making things its creative expression of some sort. And the interesting thing about it also is that it is the process of doing it and the end result, both of those things are considered, and if you somehow can tie all that together, then you'll start getting a handle. 

Kasey Olander: 

And I mean that allows it to encompass so many other things besides, I think people usually just think of drawing and painting, and that's art. When I go to an art museum, that's kind of what I expect to see. But already we've alluded to music, but there also could be photography and film and theater, literature, storytelling. I think in our last episode, Neil, you mentioned humor. And so that's another dimension to explorers that it's not as easy to put in a box as some might prefer. 

Todd  Agnew: 

I mean preaching. Preaching is an art. You can definitely listen to a preacher and go, "Hey, their content is great, and they present it very clearly, and that is their artistic choice." And I've heard a one preacher that I went, "That's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard." I mean, he was a craftsman that he was weaving lyrics in and out of it. I mean, it was this gorgeous thing and I got to work with him for a week, and I loved every sermon, but we see it in so many different things. So I'm glad you brought that up. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah. 

Neil Coulter: 

It's something... It's a set apart action. When you preach, you're speaking, but it's not like you're just talking, having a conversation, you're doing something that is deliberately, purposely set apart to be something else. It's planned differently. It has different boundaries around it. 

Kasey Olander: 

That is really fascinating. So I like that you guys have helped us to create a framework that's still a little bit fluid in terms of what we're talking about with the arts. I want to go back to Todd. You said that it's not just the end result, but it's also the process. Can you speak a little bit to, not the specific things that you're bad at, but I mean how can somebody enjoy something that they don't feel like they excel at, either the end result or the process? 

Todd  Agnew: 

Yeah, absolutely. When I was here doing my THM, I took the creative writing class with Dr. Glahn and I was in there and I really enjoyed it. And then I kind of got stuck in the middle of the class and I had talked to a different friend of mine that was working on staff here, and I came into our office and I'm like, "I'm just doing this." And I tried to describe where I was and I was working on poetry and she's like, "Todd, you just need to write." I was like, "Say more. I don't quite understand." She's like, "You're processing this as if it's a product for people to buy and does it fit in a brand? Who's this for and who's it going to change their life?" She's like, "You have skipped the process of learning how to be a poet." She's like, "You need to write for you." 

She's like, "You didn't start writing music for all the other things. You wrote it because you like it." And she's like, "You need to take those steps and learn that language." And she was so right. And it really freed me from the, "Hey, I've got to figure out how to be successful at this." And that's not really where I was. I was really uncomfortable because I already had a platform because of my music. So anything I do, I can put it already on that platform, even though I don't know how to do it yet. 

I was trying to pre craft the end result of what this art was going to be. And that's not what art is. It's living and taking the risk and trying to figure out what this thing is that I'm making and what of my life is coming into this. And so that's been the journey for me in all the other arts that I have dip my toe into and doing that has brought me back to my own art and gone, "I need to still be taking those risks as a songwriter and as a musician too." And that's been a good circle for me. 

Kasey Olander: 

And it takes a certain level of vulnerability to say, like you talked about, "What part of myself am I bringing into this that it makes it available for maybe other people to critique or what have you." 

Todd  Agnew: 

Absolutely. Yeah, that's a hard part of art. I had somebody in my 101 class last semester that was like, "I love doing this. How can you ever share it with anybody? How can you put it out there that somebody could not like it?" And I was like, "Oh." I mean, I think originally I was going, "Oh, I'm so sorry you feel..." And I looked around the room and I see everybody going, "Mm-hm." I was like, "Oh, we need to talk about this." And it ended up being a really valuable conversation. And if you look at secular music, which I'm not recommending you listen to it, I'm just saying that if you look at that process over the last 10, 15 years, one of the things you're seeing in pop music is they're starting to write really vulnerable things because there's pro songwriters that are listening to the artists and going, "Hey, if you will be willing to share that, there are people out there that feel that that don't have an outlet for yet," and it could be really valuable. And so we see that in a lot of the arts. 

Kasey Olander: 

And that's weaving together what you all said earlier, like you were talking about creative expression, but also this intentional communication. 

Neil Coulter: 

And along with that, I think back to what we're saying about categories and boxes that we put things in. I think in American culture generally, we've made this category of the artist that is such a high and lofty, this genius pulling down something from on high to share with the rest of us. And I think that intimidates all of us who we have things to share, but we get to that point and we think, "When is this ever going to be ready that good?" And we think it's never going to be that good, but I think can shift our perception and think we are all making things and we all can share things. And if we didn't have that pressure of absolute perfection and purity of the arts, I think that would be freeing for everybody to participate, whether relating to people who are doing artistry or getting involved ourselves. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Absolutely. I won't mention his name because I don't have permission to tell this story, but there's a songwriter, a musician in the Christian world that wrote a few really successful worship songs. Everybody loved them, and everybody's waiting for the next big worship song. And he hit a stretch where he was just struggling in life and as we all do, and he was supposed to be going in the studio and he had to call his producer and say, "Hey, I don't have the next big hit worship song ready. I think we need to postpone this for six months or a year, and I'll see if I can get everything straightened out and write the next song that we need." 

And I'm so grateful his producer was said, "Why don't you just come in and let's write those songs? Let's write the songs about you in the middle of this struggle, I don't have everything figured out." And I'm so grateful for that because that's where we're operating from all the time. We're never operating just from the pinnacle of great worship songs. We're usually living in the, we know that's true, but this is where my life is, and man, I want to meet that producer someday because that was a great piece of advice. 

Kasey Olander: 

Right. And that's so much more, I don't want to say more, but it is relatable to regular humans who don't feel like they're this artist who's capturing the perfect thing or don't feel like they're in that whatever, if you want to call it a mountaintop season or something like that of perfect worship music. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Absolutely. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah. So that brings us up to a good point. What role do we think that the music or the arts in general can have in our worship of God? 

Neil Coulter: 

You always look at me like this. Well, I would say that the arts in general, at their best, they open up a space for us to consider other possibilities or to consider other insights that everyday life shields us from. Because everyday life, it's frenetic, it's fast. We don't often have space to just imagine other insights, other possibilities, and the arts, they hold us in place for a moment and they say, "Don't make a judgment about this. Stop for a minute. Gaze at this painting. Listen to the song a few times over and really imagine what God might be saying to you or what is happening in the world around you in a way that you don't get space for in just all the stuff you do, your daily chores, your job, all of that." 

Kasey Olander: 

And that's a good point because that's even offering another perspective, other possibilities include when you're in a certain season of just everyday life, you might feel like you're the only one. Other people are having these amazing worship experiences or something, but you're the only one who's kind of stuck in the everyday kind of mundane thing. But another possibility is that no, all of us are, that's where most of us live most of the time. So it's a way to entertain the other people's perspective as well. 

Todd  Agnew: 

And so the obvious one when you're talking about worship is, well, worship music. And so the easy one is that it's something that we get to do together, that the music aspect allows us to worship together and to do something in a way that, "Hey, there's something happening because all of us are doing this at the same time that we are lifting our voices together." And the Bible talks about that, that we are being encouraged by the truth that is being spoken next to us and that we are doing this together. And so I think that's a valuable aspect of it. One that I'm really digging into the last few years is I always use the phrase art as a language. And we know that God is infinite, and so we are worshipping God that is beyond all the lyrics of all the songs that we know. 

He is beyond all the texts of the theology books we have read. So what do we have that can go beyond that? Well, we have the arts, and that doesn't mean that the arts are doing right theology, and that's not saying it. It's saying, "Hey, this is a way for us to interact with some of the aspects of God that we have not been able to figure out how to put into this box yet." Or it might be hate, there's an emotion to the fact that they're tied together and you can learn the fact, but the emotion may be expressed in the melody and the fact is expressed in the lyric, and hopefully there's also beauty in the lyric, that's ideal, but we're getting to wrestle the lots of ideas and respond in a language that works a little differently. 

Neil Coulter: 

I love that. And I think along with that, that it connects to the emotions and the community. I think it's the idea that the arts affirm that God is the creator and the Lord over all of creation and including all of our physical senses. And so our theologizing, our understanding, our relating to God is not just logical statements and words in our minds, but he also intended for us to delight in color and taste and temperature and just all these things around us. Those were not extra or mistakes. Those were part of our relationship with him, his presence with us. 

Kasey Olander: 

Right. Yeah. That were embodied creatures, were embodied humans, and that Jesus even took on flesh and became one of us as evidence to the fact that God values all of these things and that they're not frivolous details that we shouldn't be bothered to notice, but they're real parts of the human experience. 

Neil Coulter: 

It's not a temporary thing that we're enduring while we're in this world. And someday we'll shed all those senses. I think that's part of who God made us to be for all time. I think he loves that we can enjoy his creation in those special ways, and the arts bring that up. 

Kasey Olander: 

And sometimes Christians or academics or something might have a tendency to sort be too rigid about facts only or logic and rationale and reasoning and stuff, when in fact it's maybe negligent to shirk all these other dimensions of who we are as people. It's a way to connect with other people. And we also have episodes of The Table Podcast for everything. So we have a Christian view of emotions and things like that because we think that they're worth exploring. It's not that our emotions or our feelings or our senses are what define reality, but it's that they're important to who we are and help us to understand the world that we live in. 

Neil Coulter: 

And I think that's another cultural thing that in Western culture generally, if I can generalize like that, I think we can be tempted to feel like verbal communication is the most precise and trustworthy. And when you get the arts, especially when you're talking about arts in a church context or in a Christian life context, it can feel like you're on shakier ground. Anything might happen and you don't know if it's correct or not theologically right away. And so that's an issue for I think why I think it's worth us pursuing the arts as Christians because it takes us into the mystery of God like what Todd was alluding to. We can't know everything. And again, that's cultural because other cultures in the world don't have that feeling about the written word or the spoken word. They would feel more like what we talk about together is more reliable than what's printed in a book. But... Yeah. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, that's a great point. And that's a really helpful perspective and what humility that takes to recognize that even the way that I perceive things is not always 100% guaranteed, the best way to perceive them or even to express them, I guess. So I think one more thing that I want to explore a little bit, how is art impacted by a person's worldview? Because Neil, you just mentioned this, so I guess the dimension of creating art, but also the dimension of experiencing art. Start with you. 

Neil Coulter: 

Well, I think from an artist's perspective, I think a lot of creators, a lot of artists working professionally as artists, I think they enjoy the freedom, the open space to explore things. And so I think a lot of artists make art to share with people that is not the final punctuation on what they think about things. I think they want people to question it with them, and it's part of their journey of learning. And so it's not a dogmatic final statement, but it's something they're working through and wrestling through like the songs that Todd mentioned. It's a moment in life that you want to just hang with for a bit and probe a little and see what it really means and what you really do think about it. And so I think there's an aspect of questioning that can be built into art, and I think that's valuable for us to explore that. But again, it's a discipline to enter that and take it for what it is. And I don't know, not expect too much of it. I don't know. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Yeah. In my PhD program, I had a professor that noticed that I was really pushing back against presenting papers at academic conferences, and I was like, "Yeah, no, I'm not doing that." And he was so helpful to go, "I think that you think that presenting an academic paper is that you have figured everything out and have written the perfect explanation of it, and now you are just showing it off to everybody. And if you are wrong that they are going to get out their red pins and start writing on your paper." I'm like, "That is what it is, right?" He's like, "No." He's like, "Theology is human beings as the church trying to have a conversation about the God they know and love and have been saved by who is infinite, who we can't get all the things nailed down about. 

So the papers we present are just the next sentence in a 2,000-year conversation, and your sentence might be wrong, but your sentence needs to happen so somebody can say the next sentence." And all it was was a sentence. And I just went, "What? That is not..." Because I grew up in the American educational system and it's taking the test, it's learning the facts, it's spitting it back out. And I just wasn't taught like that. So that's been this really wonderful freeing thing for me. I mean, I'm still not presenting papers, but just living in that idea, and I think it works really well here, is that we feel uncomfortable showing a painting as a part of a church service because I don't know how you're going to interpret it. I can't control the emotion you feel when you see that. And as a church staff person, I want to make sure that you walk out with the thing we designed this service for. But what I've learned over time is I kind of have an overconfidence in words is that I think I can control what you think when I speak it to you. 

But the truth is I don't control that either. My wife came home from work a few months ago and said, "In a conversation where do you think meaning happens?" And my wife is a nurse, so this is not a normal conversation right off the bat. She is a, let's do this. She was an ER nurse for a long time, so do this, save this person's life. That's the way she approaches most things. So this is a really unusual question, and so I was like, "Hold on, let me think. Where does meaning occur in a conversation?" I was like, "Inside the mind of the hearer." She's like, "That's what my boss said. That sounds ridiculous." I'm like, "No, it doesn't mean you didn't mean anything when you said it. It means that you can't control the worldview in which it was received. You can't control their story that your words entered into. That's why we have trigger warnings because I don't know what this word might do to you if you have a different story, if you have a different experience." 

And so the thing is, our words are always entering into somebody else's story and the arts are doing the same thing. And we don't know exactly what that is going to be. If you go to a certain church, we have some generalizations about what your life might be like, but our world is getting more diverse by the minute. Even at my little church that a few years ago was very in a community that was rural, not rural, was whatsoever in between rural and city, the edge of the suburbs, but was country for a long time, was very white, was very... It was this certain thing. And we have all these African immigrants moving into our community and all of a sudden coming to church and you're like, "It's wonderful that you're here. I don't know your story. I don't know how the stuff we're presenting is going to be received to you. Can you tell me and can you show me how you do this? What was worship like for you? Because I would like for us to do that, and I don't have any idea where to start." 

Kasey Olander: 

Right. Which is sort of like what Neil was talking about earlier with the ethnomusicology and these different perspectives of how people are coming together and helping people to all worship the same God, but in their unique cultural context and in their different ways. 

Neil Coulter: 

That's what one of the things that arts can do is they can build community in a healthy way. So in American society right now, we sometimes don't converse cordially with courtesy to one another. If we've perceived that we're talking to somebody who doesn't agree with us on something and the arts give us this open space where it's okay to not have a final answer, and it's okay to just explore and play around a little bit. And I think that's very healthy for a community to do this well. And as Todd is saying, to not demand certain things artistically, but to go in with a learner's attitude and ask and say, "What would you like to do? How is this striking you? What are you getting from this? And how can we be together better?" 

Kasey Olander: 

It's relieving to have permission to not have all the answers or to even be not even sure what questions to ask, I guess. 

Neil Coulter: 

Yeah, I guess in contrast to how we feel about words, we sense that maybe in the arts, if there's not a final answer, then there's not a wrong answer. And so there's that freedom to say we don't have to get to a certain specified point. We're not outcomes oriented or goal oriented in that way, but we are simply trying to find the best way to be together. And that might take all sorts of forms in every community and every church. 

Kasey Olander: 

And I love that, going back to Todd, what you said earlier, also, by the way, I've been noticing that every time I ask a question, Todd tells a story and I love it. I'm like, "Why don't I ask people for this more often?" Because I feel like that's a demonstration of how the arts is captivating. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Well, it's also that's an art, that's a world view that I talk in stories, you can ask my students. They're like, "We sometimes just want to know what should we write down." 

Kasey Olander: 

Answer the question, Todd. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Yeah. And I'm like, "Yeah, but I can put it in a sentence, but that sentence isn't the thing." And I've had to come to grips with the story's not the thing either, but it's a better version of how I actually understand that. 

Kasey Olander: 

It's a good example of how those things are in a sense, I guess just differently relatable than just dictating the facts of something. The fact that you're telling a story about a conversation that you had with your wife or your professor or something is something that like, okay, then I can relate to the emotions of the parties involved in a different way than if you kind of just said a little one sentence thing about the perspective, I guess. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Right. Yeah, absolutely. All those things are... They're so much more complicated than the sentence. And I really learned that when I was doing my ThM again with Dr. Glahn again, now I've been promoted. I finished that class and now I'm grading for that class. I'm going back and being a grader. And what I realized was that she would always have... You didn't ever read your own piece that you wrote, you'd always have to hand it to the next person and they would read it. And so much of my humor is timing and it's vocal inflection that my jokes didn't land when somebody else read them, it just sounded dumb. I was like, "Oh, no." But what it made me realize is that's true of all writers, is that you don't get to control how somebody reads it. So the brilliant writers are crafting the meaning into the words, not their voice. 

Kasey Olander: 

The delivery. 

Todd  Agnew: 

And so the emotional impact didn't come because you heard my vocal inflection or because I paused here, if they want you to pause, they have to figure out a way to write it so that you pause without using ellipses because that's what I would do. And then I was like, "Oh, I don't see any great writer doing that," but I so wanted it to pause right there, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. And I still haven't because that's not my art, but I'm learning. 

Kasey Olander: 

Neil, if you have any insight as from your writing experience. 

Neil Coulter: 

Well, I mean, you're exactly right that it's an art to crafting words so that you don't have... My temptation is to use italics when I want to emphasize something, and I think like you do. If this really just read perfectly, they would need that visual cue. They would get it. And that's what separates the writers who labor over that and hone that over years and years from those of us who do it more informally. 

Kasey Olander: 

And I like those words because it dignifies that art is a craft. Writing is one of those, but you're talking about laboring and honing, and it's not just sometimes people think about art if they're belittling it as kind of frivolous or something that children do, but I mean, it's so hard. Writing is hard. And there's a number of different things that are difficult, especially because of the skills involved with different forms of art. But I also think that that's part of the beauty of it, is to see somebody who's so practiced in something over time to be a more effective communicator, for example, or storyteller. But that that's also the beauty of having different media that we can have a different experience at the theater than we do the play theater than a movie theater, than we do at a concert and than we do reading a piece of literature, which just reminds me of the creativity of God that he gave us that many dimensions of ways to express something. 

Todd  Agnew: 

That's great. Yeah, that comes up a lot in the conversation about who's an artist who is creative, because I think we tend to have the pendulum swing too far because we get really passionate about it and we're like, "Look, everybody's creative. Everybody is made in the image of God. God is the maker, so you're a maker." And they're like, "No, I'm not." You are just maybe in a different way. Maybe you're willing when you're cooking to put a different spice in it than the recipe said. And my son's learning to cook, and I've already seen that about him that he's like, "Well, I didn't just follow the recipe." I'm like, "But you haven't ever made it before." 

Yeah, but I just thought this would... So he's making an artistic decision in that, but that's a creative thing, whether or not he considers himself to be creative, but everybody's an artist, everybody's creative, sometimes that can leave out the fact that, "Hey, it does actually mean something to be an artist that you've dedicated yourself to a craft and you've spent however many thousands of hours doing this." And I think both of those things can be true. I think it can be, "Hey, everybody is creative and there's something about devoting yourself to it and learning the craft and hopefully becoming excellent or at least minutely accomplished." 

Kasey Olander: 

And that it sort of reminds me of a conversation around missionaries like, "Oh, everybody's a missionary. We're all going to share the gospel with people or... But wait a minute, we actually recognize the fact that some people move their entire lives and their families to a country and a culture that they don't know," that kind of thing. So I like that you're saying it's a both and kind of thing. You're exemplifying that we don't have to have all of the answers in a row and tie everything up with a neat bow. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Some people go to Papua New Guinea. 

Kasey Olander: 

Some people do. 

Todd  Agnew: 

And that shouldn't be a... Well, that's just like me. That's the same when I share Jesus at the grocery store, and it is still sharing the gospel and it is a special thing that took devotion and time and learning how to do something that the rest of us don't know how to do. So I love that there's both. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, absolutely. And that there's the freedom to have, I don't know if I would say it's a tension to manage, but it's the freedom to have things that sound contradictory both be true at the same time. 

Todd  Agnew: 

That's another episode of The Table Podcast. 

Neil Coulter: 

That's a great episode. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Coming soon. 

Kasey Olander: 

To a headset near you. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

Well, I always wish that we had longer to talk about things, but what closing thoughts would you have to somebody who is kind of dabbling in appreciating art for the first time? Either they're exploring a new medium of the arts that they haven't before, or they're like, "Well, I have maybe some artsy loved ones that I don't really get them, but maybe I'll try to." 

Neil Coulter: 

I love that... So early in this conversation, Todd brought up that it's product and process, and I think the process part is really key to understanding, especially the art and artistry of the past century in America and Europe because I think the focus for a lot of artists has been taken off the end product, and what's important is the process. So I would say for appreciating art, I would encourage Christians especially to hold lightly how the end product makes you feel, especially on first judgment. If you see an abstract painting and you don't understand it or you say a child could do this or any of those things we've heard, don't stay there, but go to what was the process? What was the artist wrestling with and how did it lead to this? What does this mean? Then I would also say the author or the artist is not the end of it because they had questions as they were creating a bit of artistry and they wanted you to have your own questions. 

And so it's this fluid process of it's not all about the end product, so don't stay there, but don't get so laser focused on who the artist is and what their perspective is that you can't then bring your own questions to it. The artists are going to have different theology than you do, and yet they can still be wrestling with questions that we all wrestle with and the answers they get to in creating art can be very valuable even when we disagree. So I would say give yourself that freedom, that patience to really just gaze or listen or spend time with the artistic product and with what you can learn about what went into it, the behind the scenes. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, that's another both and. 

Neil Coulter: 

Definitely. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Yeah, that's really good. I always have a hard time with final things because- 

Kasey Olander: 

It's not final, we're just still talking. 

Todd  Agnew: 

It's just a 6,000 years of history. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I love wrestling with arts in the church, and this is the same conversation of you have a loved one that does this and you don't, or, "Hey, there's this thing out there that you don't really understand." The church is having the same conversation right now. There's all these arts out there and it's culture with the big C, and is that good or bad? Is it affecting us? And so I always keep coming back to my art as a language. I'm like, "Hey, you can't have that conversation if you don't learn the language," and so you're not going to have any success and talking about paintings until you start learning something about paintings. 

I am a baby in the painting conversation, but when I made a friend that was a painter that sat me down in front of a painting and walked me through how to respond to it, because I'm going at it academically, analytically, "Okay, it's red and there's some other paint strokes over there," and I'm trying to analyze it and figure it out, and she's just like, "Yeah, that's not going to work. I mean, it's not that it's not that, but that's not a good entry point for you." And I think the church is trying to figure that out as well of what do these things have to do with us and how do we do them well? Is this an arena that we have just left behind that we continue to leave behind, or is this a conversation we can still have that can be beneficial? 

Kasey Olander: 

Right. And that brings us to, again, the community aspect that we talked about earlier that sort of, I don't know if mentor is the right word, but that sort of willingness to explain your experience, bring somebody else into your experience like, "Okay, if I've created this painting, taking the time to bring someone else into that reinforces the sense of community and also helps both of you grow as people." I always am so... I don't know, there's so many things that are like this, but when I was a child and my friend who's also a child was trying to learn the guitar and she was trying to teach me how I was like, "This is impossible. I always thought it was so easy because the people on stage leading worship look like it's so easy and it turns out this is the hardest thing in the world." And so having that kind of experience I think is so helpful to gain more of an appreciation for mean for any craft or any activity, but especially the arts and the ones that we aren't familiar with or don't understand as well. 

Todd  Agnew: 

There's also something about though, even when you're bad at the guitar, the first time you play a song and you can tell what song it is, you can listen and go, "Oh, it's this." There's a great joy in that even though you're a beginner. And I think that's true across the arts, and I think that's a step in an entry point for us. 

Neil Coulter: 

All along the way, there's these sensory pleasures that just give you joy regardless of what the outcome is. If you go to just a painting event where you go in on a Friday night and everybody does the same landscape, what you come out with is not a masterpiece, but you have so enjoyed how it feels to put paint on a canvas. As you said earlier, it's this embodied, we are fully formed creatures in this creation who can do interesting things. 

Kasey Olander: 

And what a gift that is from God who gave us our bodies and all of these different senses to experience his creation with. 

Neil Coulter: 

Absolutely. 

Kasey Olander: 

We've covered a lot of ground. We've talked about what art is, we've talked about that it's a process in addition to the final product. We've talked about who is an artist and the ways that we can go about engaging with art and appreciating it more. And so I'm really grateful to each of you guys. This conversation has been really a pleasure to me, and I'm delighted to have had you both. 

Neil Coulter: 

Thank you so much. 

Todd  Agnew: 

Thanks for having me. 

Kasey Olander: 

We also want to say thanks to you for listening. If you like our show, go ahead and leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app so that other people can discover us. We hope that you'll join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life.