Our 2008 New College lecturer argues for the importance of artists and artistry as witness-bearers to Christ’s redemptive engagement with us as human creatures.

We might reasonably expect artistic imagination to be counted naturally among the greatest of God’s gifts to humankind. While the precise nature of art’s effect upon us remains a subject of complexity and dispute, we hardly need a degree in aesthetics to identify the effect when it happens, to realise its force and depth, and that it is something good for which we are mostly glad. The work of art is not the only thing to affect us in such ways (there are other, ‘natural’, sources of the effect), but art probably does it more consistently and well than most other things. We may not be able to define it, but most of us have some intuitive sense of the sort of response it is that melodies, paintings, poems, films, novels and other works of artistic imagination often grant or provoke in us. It is a response for which we are grateful when it occurs. On the whole, then, artistic creativity is a source of joy and leaves us with a sense of having tasted something good and worthwhile, even when we can’t say exactly why. The world would somehow be a less attractive place without it.

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