Livin' in the Arts Village

In my post yesterday, I concluded by mentioning that I was planning on sharing more about my own role on staff at the Duke Youth Academy. I want to do that today by offering a bit about the our Arts Village.

There are a couple of ways to think about how art and faith relate to one another. One way - maybe the dominant way in our culture - is to think about how the arts can "enhance" worship or "add to" our faith. That's not the view we take at DYA. Why? Because when we think of the arts as an "add on," we are shortchanging the importance of beauty and creativity as an integral and deep part of God's creation.

So DYA brings in a group of professional artists-in-residence each summer to lead an Arts Village. Our artists take full part in community life, including offering their gifts in daily worship. They also lead workshops for our students, which invite them to learn and practice the arts as a part of their exploration into the richness and depth of the Christian life.

Our artists help the DYA students see how theology is inherently artistic because it is incarnational. It is embodied just as God's creation is embodied and just as God the Son became embodied in Jesus.

So let me introduce you to this year's Arts Village staff. All four of our artists have theological degrees from Duke Divinity School, and all four understand their artistic gifts to be the locus of their calling into ministry with and for the church. They are:

Katherine Owen, who leads workshops on pottery-making and working in clay. She has worked with the Arts Village for several years, and when she's not at DYA, Katherine spends most days covered in clay at her potter's wheel. You can find out more biographical details about Katherine here, and you can learn about her work at her Wild Extravagant Livers of Life website.

Tracy Radosevic, who leads workshops on storytelling. This year is her seventh with DYA. She has the gift of opening Scripture up in a way that allows others to hear it as if for the first time. Tracy has been a full-time professional storyteller for twelve years and in that time has traveled the globe performing, teaching, preaching, and leading retreats. You can learn more about Tracy here, the bio page of Tracy's great website describing her work & ministry.

Ronya-Lee Anderson, who leads workshops on sacred dance. Trained in modern, tap, jazz, ballet, and hip hop, she has danced both nationally and internationally with various performing arts companies. Ronya-Lee is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Dancing by the Power Ministries, a non-profit organization that aims to transform young people through dance. She is also the Director of Youth Ministries at Annandale United Methodist Church in Annandale, VA.

Carole Baker, who leads our workshops in the visual arts. She is a Research Associate at Duke Divinity School, where she gets to employ her theological gifts in working with such theologians as Stanley Hauerwas and Richard Hays. This is her fifth year overall working with DYA. As a visual artist and theologian, Carole is interested in the way imagery shapes the religious/theological imagination. (Read about her background and work here.) Carole's latest work, "Mary: The Paper Doll Project," is an interactive work of art that looks at the way the Virgin Mary has been depicted in different cultures around the world. It is on display during DYA and will be touring nationally in the coming year. (If your church or organization would like to host the Mary Project, I would encourage you to contact Carole.)

Not all our students may come here thinking of themselves as creative people. But what we try to teach them is that each of them is the created being of a creative Creator! We are all God's creatures, and we live in a physical reality that God made and called good.

So the arts are really about learning to see the exquisite beauty of the creation and recognize how we can glorify God through our artistic gifts. And that's something we can all do with joy and thanksgiving!

The Incarnation of the Son of God

Our theme at DYA today is Christ, and Dr. J. Kameron Carter got things going at our plenary session this morning by talking about Incarnation.

He encouraged the students to think about some key aspects of God's revelation in Christ Jesus:

- The truth of the Incarnation: Jesus Christ as truly God and truly human.

- The story of the Incarnation: Christmas! Or, restoration and reconciliation (which brings to God's creation a revolution).

- The ethics of the Incarnation: Or, the freedom of the Christian. It is the freedom to be God's creature; not to be in bondage, but to be in solidarity with God and one another. The ethics of the Incarnation is the ethics of freedom!

Prof. Carter spoke about the body of Jesus Christ as pointing to a social order, which we become part of through our baptism. We exist in a number of social orders, of course: our family, neighborhood, city, nation, university, fraternal organization, political party, place of employment, etc. But the social order that Jesus creates seeks to supersede all other social orders.

And particularly since so many of our social orders treat someone or something other than Jesus as Lord, our calling into the body of Christ ultimately calls those social orders into question. Remarking on the incompatibility of those earthly social orders that represent idolatries and false gods with the social order of Jesus, Dr. Carter said, "The social order that is Jesus Christ kills all false social orders. And the name for that is Easter."

It was a fascinating presentation on the meaning of God's Incarnation in Jesus, made more so by Dr. Carter sharing stories and pictures of a recent trip he took to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he was able to study ways in which the history of that country shows how the Church actively cooperated with anti-Christian political, social, and military forces during the Portugese and Spanish colonial periods in Latin America.

But, as Dr. Carter argued, the very way of life offered to us by the gospel of Jesus shows us that the Christian faith is not destined to be allied with those powers and principalities that would corrupt it beyond recognition. Jesus always calls us to himself. And that is good news.

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In the next couple of days, I'll try to write more about my own role at the Duke Youth Academy. I am the Ministry Coordinator for Christian Practices here, and my main duties are to oversee our Arts Village and Prayer Practice Workshops. These are ways that we try to help our students "live into" their faith by understanding that the salvation God is bringing to us involves our bodies and that theological reflection is inherently aesthetic and corporeal.

And so we invite them to study with professional artists who are also committed Christians, as well as to engage in forms of prayer with which they may not be familiar.

More on that to come!