Christopher Pramuk’s The Artist Alive is a multivalent exploration of how the popular arts hold the potential to transform consciousness. It is also a profound investigation for people of all ages into the transformative power of art in its myriad forms. I envy the young people who have the privilege of sitting in Chris’s classes, where theology is taught not as a series of propositions or doctrines, but as the existential basis of all genuine religion that ties us to planet Earth by opening us to mystery, “radical amazement,” and compassion. Pramuk’s book establishes that everyone has access to a common core of creative power from which abundant life, “aliveness,” pours continuously in a living stream despite the sorrows, injustices, suffering and brokenness we all experience. This is a book that takes a hard look at the world of our times yet offers hope. Enter its pages and find yourself recovering “beginner’s mind,” checking out YouTube recordings of your favorite artists, discovering new ones, moving and grooving to a deeper music that enables the mind to slowly descend into the heart and make the world a better place. As Pramuk puts it, “[T]his is one of our most urgent and beautiful tasks today: to teach to the imaginations of young people, to feed their wonder, to dare them to imagine, in spite of it all, a future of peace.”