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The Next Generation: Contemporary Expressions of Faith (hereafter NG) is a slightly different but closely related project. The book serves as the catalogue to an exhibition that opened at the Museum of Biblical Art (MoBiA) in New York City this fall, organized and curated by Bethel University art historian Wayne Roosa and MoBiA's chief curator Patricia C. Pongracz. NG highlights 44 artists whose work deals explicitly with biblical themes. This project is a collaboration between MoBiA and CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts), an organization over 25 years old and now based on the campus of Gordon College, which is almost singularly committed to expand the presence of confessing Christians in the art world.

NG features an excellent curatorial essay by Pongracz and a major chapter by Roosa, an in-depth historical and critical assessment of the role that the Scriptures have played in the history of Western art. (Roosa's chapter is itself a major contribution to the growing presence of confessing Christians in the contemporary art world.) Unlike AAB, NG also includes artists' statements, allowing the artists themselves to define the meaning and significance of their work. Moreover, NG is organized, and curated, in terms of separate themes: "God in the Details," "God in the Mystery," "The Book," "Faith and Healing by Grace," "The Altarpiece and Book as Idea," and "Last Things."

The two projects share a common belief in the importance of aesthetics, beauty, and the practice of art in culture. So rarely do such presses such as Eerdmans, Baker, Intervarsity, and the like produce books on the visual artists, it is indeed cause for celebration any time they appear. (Eerdmans should especially be commended for their efforts. I am well aware that producing art books is no easy and cost-efficient endeavor and requires a serious commitment on the part of publisher.) These books are required additions to the library of any culturally engaged Christian who cares about the visual arts. They are a Who's Who for the largely North American, largely evangelical, art world they represent. ABB and NG are, without question, serious and significant contributions to Christian cultural engagement. They are even more important since they were produced by artists, art historians, and curators, not philosophers and theologians; it is the art itself, not philosophy or theology, that is their subject.

And yet, I have some concerns. There is a general tendency in these books to locate a Christian essence in style (e.g., figuration, as manifest in ABB) or subject matter (e.g., biblical themes, as in NG) that puts considerable limits on how and in what ways one understands contemporary art and the Christian faith. Valorizing a distinctive style or subject matter makes critical interpretation much easier in the short run, but risks giving short shrift to art that is not so easily defined. Closely related to this is the propensity for the artist's faith to overtake aesthetic and critical criteria by which her art is evaluated. Consequently, art is often understood as a visual illustration of a personal faith shaped and formed outside the studio.

There is also a tendency to demonize unnecessarily the history of modern art and the contemporary art world against which the writer then posits an idealized Christian artistic past and present. In troubling ways, this Christian perspective requires a certain kind of art world against which to react. In addition to giving it more power than it actually possesses, this approach tends to flatten out the contemporary art world, turning it into a single, monolithic "thing" that is "out there" while at the same time discouraging artists and critics from self-critically assessing how and in what ways "Christian art" is itself a part of this art world.

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February (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50