Theological Studies, Vol. 81, 2020
The Artist Alive: Explorations in Music, Art & Theology. By Christopher Pramuk.
Winona, MN: Anselm Academic, 2019. Pp. 324. $29.95.
Early in this book, Pramuk quotes a student’s first reaction to hearing Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon: “To try to explain the impact of the album would be fruitless because then one would start to sound like a textbook” (41). Her response captures a guiding conviction of P.’s project—that through the arts we can encounter the ineffable that is likewise at the heart of theology. P. has, throughout his award-winning teaching career, incorporated the arts to facilitate this encounter, especially in his popular course, “Music, Art, and Theology.” This book, which could serve as an instructor’s handbook or a textbook for such a course, guides us through this master class with the impassioned prose of a captivating teacher (not the dull drone of that dreaded textbook author!).
The book is pragmatically structured for classroom use. Across the introduction and first chapter, readers learn of the author’s underlying epistemological framework and the theological convictions that animate it. Each person possesses the “seeds of an eternal loving Presence,” and our capacity for wonder and amazement evince this (37). Perceiving this ineffable Presence is, however, a matter of disposition, which can atrophy. P. believes that art not only expresses wonder but can also cultivate a disposition of perceiving “beyond the usual” (34). Indeed, he posits that, “More than 250 Theological Studies 81(1) our scholars and theologians, and certainly more than our politicians and daily newsmakers, it is the world’s artists who can help us reclaim the will to wonder, and so enkindle hope” (37).
P. illustrates this through the “case studies” featured in chapters 2 through 9. Each applies the framework of his early chapters to analyze a work or works of art. While music is featured most frequently (e.g., songs from Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Indigo Girls, Bruce Springsteen), P. engages a range of artwork that includes fiction, film, poetry, and iconography from various US and international cultural contexts.
Readers need not be aficionados to follow along. Through his use of Gadamer’s hermeneutical triad of looking “behind,” “within,” and “in front of” the “text,” P. provides an abundance of information to consider as readers innovate and weigh interpretations. Interwoven biblical, philosophical, and theological ideas (e.g., from Charles Taylor, A. J. Heschel, Merton, J. B. Metz) invite readers to link the artist’s perspective to the astonishment, outrage, and hope of theologians who witness to God’s presence and absence in the world, too. Listed at each chapter’s conclusion are additional resources that supply readers and potential instructors with ideas for expanding or changing up each case study. Appendices on classroom activities and assignment ideas aid this too.
Across the case studies, why P. esteems the arts as a medium for cultivating and converting perception becomes clear: art reaches beyond reason to engage the aesthetic and affective dimensions of human life. P.’s frequent association of the artistic and theological disposition with “empathy” suggests that only a cultivated capacity to feel as and with the other can rightly attune a person to the world as it is and should be. This conviction runs throughout chapter 5, where P. explores the music of Stevie Wonder, for example. Even as P. acknowledges the potential empathic impasses born of racial segregation and injustice, he elucidates from Wonder’s life and work a universal call to extend empathy beyond that which “preempt[s] the possibility of love,” “no matter what your racial identity or history” (126). P.’s passion for cultivating empathy is timely amid a wider, growing interest in empathy as an anecdote to societal polarization, but he does not assuage all doubts about what a universal call to empathy might mask. I left chapter 5 wondering whether P. sufficiently accounts for the disproportionate consequences incurred by African Americans as a result of mutual misperceptions “across the color line.” P. would surely agree that the limits of white empathy have had more dire collective consequences than those of the African American community, though this goes unsaid in the otherwise careful chapter.
That the world urgently needs the clear-eyed criticism and hopeful imagination of the artist is another of P.’s arguments. His case studies persuasively show the capacity of art to name and indict distortive cultural imaginaries that foster unsatisfying lives and social injustice. Many desire to address such realities in the classroom: the banality of war, the plight of refugees, ecological devastation, the perils of the modern technological milieu, racial injustice, violent sexual mores, cis- and heteronormativity. To this end, instructors could choose particular case studies for use in a class on one of these topics. Chapter 3’s stirring analysis of Jean Giono’s story, “The Man Who Planted Trees,” and filmmaker Godrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy, could serve discussions on Book Reviews 251 capitalism, technology, or our ecological crisis, for example. Whether instructors utilize this plentiful resource selectively or adopt it all together, theological education will be more wonder-filled for it.
Jessica Coblentz
Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN