Provocation and Art: The Boundaries of Expression

“Art is a form of prayer … a way to enter into relationship.”

Artist and theologian Bruce Herman reflects on the sacred vocation of making, resisting consumerism, and the divine invitation to become co-creators. From Mark Rothko to Rainer Maria Rilke, to Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, he comments on the holy risk of artmaking and the sacred fire of creative origination.

Together with Evan Rosa, Bruce Herman explores the divine vocation of art making as resistance to consumer culture and passive living. In this deeply poetic and wide-ranging conversation—and drawing from his book *Makers by Nature—*he invites us into a vision of art not as individual genius or commodity, but as service, dialogue, and co-creation rooted in love, not fear. They touch on ancient questions of human identity and desire, the creative implications of being made in the image of God, Buber’s I and Thou, the scandal of the cross, Eliot’s divine fire, Rothko’s melancholy ecstasy, and how even making a loaf of bread can be a form of holy protest. A profound reflection on what it means to be human, and how we might change our lives—through beauty, vulnerability, and relational making.

Episode Highlights

“We are made by a Maker to be makers.”

“ I think hope is being stolen from us Surreptitiously moment by moment hour by hour day by day.”

“There is no them. There is only us.”

“The work itself has a life of its own.”

“Art that serves a community.”

“You must change your life.” —Rilke, recited by Bruce Herman in reflection on the transformative power of art.

“When we're not making something, we're not whole. We're not healthy.”

“Making art is a form of prayer. It's a form of entering into relationship.”

“Art is not for the artist—any more than it's for anyone else. The work stands apart. It has its own voice.”

“We're not merely consumers—we're made by a Maker to be makers.”

“The ultimate act of art is hospitality.”

Topics and Themes

• Human beings are born to create and make meaning
• Art as theological dialogue and spiritual resistance
• Creative practice as a form of love and worship
• Christian art and culture in dialogue with contemporary issues
• Passive consumption vs. active creation
• How to engage with provocative art faithfully
• The role of beauty, mystery, and risk in the creative process
• Art that changes you spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually
• The sacred vocation of the artist in a consumerist world
• How poetry and painting open up divine encounter, particularly in Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
• Four Quartets and spiritual longing in modern poetry
• Hospitality, submission, and service as aesthetic postures
• Modern culture's sickness and art as medicine
• Encountering the cross through contemporary artistic imagination

“Archaic Torso of Apollo”

Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 –1926

We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

About Bruce Herman

Bruce Herman is a painter, writer, educator, and speaker. His art has been shown in more than 150 exhibitions—nationally in many US cities, including New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston—and internationally in England, Japan, Hong Kong, Italy, Canada, and Israel. His artwork is featured in many public and private art collections including the Vatican Museum of Modern Religious Art in Rome; The Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts print collection; The Grunewald Print Collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; DeCordova Museum in Boston; the Cape Ann Museum; and in many colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada.

Herman taught at Gordon College for nearly four decades, and is the founding chair of the Art Department there. He held the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts for more than fifteen years, and continues to curate exhibitions and manage the College art collection there. Herman completed both BFA and MFA degrees at Boston University College of Fine Arts under American artists Philip Guston, James Weeks, David Aronson, Reed Kay, and Arthur Polonsky. He was named Boston University College of Fine Arts Distinguished Alumnus of the Year 2006.

Herman’s art may be found in dozens of journals, popular magazines, newspapers, and online art features. He and co-author Walter Hansen wrote the book Through Your Eyes, 2013, Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, a thirty-year retrospective of Herman’s art as seen through the eyes of his most dedicated collector.

To learn more, explore A Video Portrait of the Artist and My Process – An Essay by Bruce Herman.

Books by Bruce Herman

*Makers by Nature: Letters from a Master Painter on Faith, Hope, and Art* (2025) *Ordinary Saints (*2018) *Through Your Eyes: The Art of Bruce Herman (2013) *QU4RTETS with Makoto Fujimura, Bruce Herman, Christopher Theofanidis, Jeremy Begbie (2012) A Broken Beauty (2006)

Show Notes

• Bruce Herman on Human Identity as Makers
  • We are created in the image of God—the ultimate “I Am”—and thus made to create.
  • “We are made by a Maker to be makers.”
  • To deny our creative impulse is to risk a deep form of spiritual unhealth.
  • Making is not just for the “artist”—everyone is born with the capacity to make.
• Theological Themes and Philosophical Frameworks
  • Influences include Martin Buber’s “I and Thou,” René Girard’s scapegoating theory, and the image of God in Genesis.
  • “We don't really exist for ourselves. We exist in the space between us.”
  • The divine invitation is relational, not autonomous.
  • Desire, imitation, and submission form the core of our relational anthropology.
• Art as Resistance to Consumerism
  • “We begin to enter into illness when we become mere consumers.”
  • Art Versus Propaganda
  • Culture is sickened by passive consumption, entertainment addiction, and aesthetic commodification.
  • Making a loaf of bread, carving wood, or crafting a cocktail are acts of cultural resistance.
  • Desire
  • “Anything is resistance… Anything is a protest against passive consumption.”
• Art as Dialogue and Submission
  • “Making art is a form of prayer. It’s a form of entering into relationship.”
  • Submission—though culturally maligned—is a necessary posture in love and art.
  • Engaging with art requires openness to transformation.
  • “If you want to really receive what a poem is communicating, you have to submit to it.”
• The Transformative Power of Encountering Art
  • Quoting Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo: “You must change your life.”
  • True art sees the viewer and invites them to become something more.
  • Herman’s own transformative moment came unexpectedly in front of a Rothko painting.
  • “The best part of my work is outside of my control.”
• Scandal, Offense, and the Cross in Art
  • Analyzing Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ as a sincere meditation on the commercialization of the cross.
  • “Does the crucifixion still carry sacred weight—or has it been reduced to jewelry?”
  • Art should provoke—but out of love, not self-aggrandizement or malice.
  • “The cross is an offense. Paul says so. But it’s the power of God for those being saved.”
• Beauty, Suffering, and Holy Risk
  • Encounter with art can arise from personal or collective suffering.
  • Bruce references Christian Wiman and Walker Percy as artists opened by pain.
  • “Sometimes it takes catastrophe to open us up again.”
  • Great art offers not escape, but transformation through vulnerability.
• The Fire and the Rose: T. S. Eliot’s Influence
  • Four Quartets shaped Herman’s artistic and theological imagination.
  • Eliot’s poetry is contemplative, musical, liturgical, and steeped in paradox.
  • “To be redeemed from fire by fire… when the fire and the rose are one.”
  • The collaborative Quartets project with Makoto Fujimura and Chris Theofanidis honors Eliot’s poetic vision.
• Living and Creating from Love, Not Fear
  • “Make from love, not fear.”
  • Fear-driven art (or politics) leads to manipulation and despair.
  • Acts of love include cooking, serving, sharing, and creating for others.
  • “The ultimate act of art is hospitality.”

Media & Intellectual References

• Makers by Nature by Bruce Herman
• Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
• The Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke
• Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art”
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by René Girard
• The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry
• Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ
• Makoto Fujimura’s Art and Collaboration