Chad Lakies

2 More CFPs on Religion, Literature, Culture and the Arts

The International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture has just listed two new CFPs for conferences in 2012. The Society’s annual conference, hosted in Copenhagen in 2012, will focus on “Cultures in Transition: Presence, Absence, Memory.” Here is the link to the Society’s new webpage where all the CFP info is located: http://isrlc.org/. The 8th […]

Heather Smith Stringer, Lee Price

Sleeping with Peaches: An Interview with Painter Lee Price

Lee Price is a figurative painter from New York. She has been painting women and food for over twenty years and continues to address the intersections of food with body image, addiction, and unabating desire. In this interview Price shares her trajectory as a painter, her personal struggles with food, and the ongoing battle of […]

Ryan Harper

The Possibility of an Evangelical Poet, Part Two

Editor’s Note: If you missed Part One of Ryan Harper’s article, click here. Louise Glück’s call for poets to embrace open-endedness are not new. She writes in the spirit of the great American poets of contingency—Walt Whitman, Charles Olson, and A. R. Ammons, to name a few. Although this tradition resonates with me, historically it […]

Kevin Gosa

Gaga à Gogo

I remember the first time I saw Lady Gaga perform on TV. She was seated at a very large and very pink piano brimming with plastic bubbles. She had barely tickled the flamingo ivory before strutting center stage to engage in a most bizarre choreography. At the time, Lady Gaga was still becoming the icon […]

Anya Liftig

Anxieties of Influence: Performance Art, Celebrity, and the Self

I have one goal as an artist: not to sit on my ass. For me, art is action in all of its variety of forms. Performance artists, then, should be pushing the boundaries of action, daring to engage with the environment, culture, and most importantly, other people as intensely as possible. I want to do the […]

Carole Baker

Celebrity and Iconicity: Some Preliminary Sketches

That contemporary America is captivated by the phenomenon of celebrity is hardly a contestable observation. Even those of us who try to limit the impact of celebrity on our life find that its tenacity is hard to overcome. Some try to overcome the impact of celebrity by willing its insignificance. But that some energy is […]

Jason Byassee

Joining the Communion of Saints and Writing the Unwritable Word

When strangers at a party or on an airplane find out you’re in divinity school, they’ll want to tell you everything they think about God. You’re supposed to listen and nod profoundly, and you’d better not correct anything they say. You’ve signed up to be a pastoral counselor, whether you meant to or not. Perhaps […]

Brett David Potter, Thomas Turner

Edible Sculpture: Cake Boss and Mortality in Food Art

The hit reality TV show Cake Boss is about more than the stressful life of the baker at a celebrated New Jersey bakery: it shows that food can be art, and in food art there is the characteristic of humanity’s mortality.