The Aesthetics of Shalom is a year-long multi-disciplinary response to the increasing antipathy and divisiveness fracturing ourselves and our world: an extended meditation on shalom involving artmaking, group study, conversation, hospitality, and friendship. The project is designed to foster robust, nuanced dialogue inside and outside the church; to cultivate generous, durable habits of patience and mercy; and to help us recover concern for our neighbor.
Matters of aesthetics are matters of formation. Aesthetics guide how we perceive, what we value, and what we recognize as worthy of our time, care, and protection: an often-unexamined lens through which we see and experience our world and discover what we actually worship. If this is true, then aesthetics and the arts emerge as fundamental to discipleship—vital for understanding ourselves and our time, what we're called towards and what we're called to stand against.
~ Lenten Devotional Zines
~ Re:Echo
~ Lenten Devotional Zines ~ Re:Echo
Re:Echo and the Artist Parish invite you to join the artists this Lent by exploring devotion and spiritual formation through making. Each week in Lent, starting with Ash Wednesday, Audrey Gorton, Maxwell Kane, Hadley Whittle, and Kory Stamper will create 8.5 x 11" zine templates with Lenten texts and an invitation to meditate on and engage with Jesus' journey to the cross using different guided artistic activities--drawing, poetry, writing, sculpture, collage. You don't need to "be an artist" to use these templates--they are for anyone who is interested in knowing how God uses the act of creating to help us see "all things new." The zine artists will also create covers for the Sunday bulletins throughout Lent as fodder for your own contemplative practice or as raw materials for use with the zine templates. The templates will be available during Sunday services and at the link below.
Making
The beating heart of The Aesthetics of Shalom is the creation of significant new works in the visual, literary, and musical arts. These new works are an invitation to wonder, and through the “baptism of the imagination” (C.S. Lewis) serve as a critical springboard for the spiritual formation of both artist and audience.
Commissioned works will include a two-issue literary journal, an album of original compositions (The Divine Dark Vol.II), and ten fine arts commissions for exhibition at our historic Center City building. Together, these works constitute a cohesive and multifaceted artistic meditation on shalom, providing multiple access points for people coming from a variety of perspectives and inviting dialogue across demographics. The Aesthetics of Shalom invites those inside and outside the church into a kind of reciprocal blessing upon blessing: a fitting notion for an extended communal contemplation of wholeness, interdependence, peace, and flourishing.
Gathering
Public artist talks, literary salons, and concerts will invite the congregation and broader public in a similar engagement with art as truth-telling and peacemaking.
Further engagement includes the launch of the Philadelphia Great Art Giveaway (PhillyGAGA), a single-day public art event in which we will purchase and give away 60 or more works by artists living and working in Philadelphia. Designed to connect artists directly with the public, PhillyGAGA practices radical generosity while activating public space with art exchange. It introduces new audiences to the joy of collecting and creates meaningful, one-on-one encounters between artists and art lovers.
The Aesthetics of Shalom also includes a comprehensive study and conversation module. The Artist Parish, which meets regularly to explore questions at the intersection of artmaking and formation, is studying the relationship between shalom and aesthetics in its monthly meetings, seeking to examine together the conditions that inhibit or cultivate flourishing and explore how we might, through our making, become peacemakers.
Finally, The Aesthetics of Shalom will include an art and theology conference to widen the conversation, share what we’ve learned, and provide tools and resources for communities in and beyond Philadelphia working to nurture and sustain shalom.
The Aesthetics of Shalom is supported by Resurrection Philadelphia, the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, and the Creative Arts Collective for Christian Life & Faith.