Talk of “space” was in the air, and resonant, when I started reading science fiction by the shelfload, c. 1958. There was a space race to see who would be the master of outer space, so the newspapers said. Walter Cronkite solemnly agreed. Sci-fi took Time (the Future) and made it Space (a zone of infinite possibility): Space-time! And these notions were somehow connected to the mundane realm of board games (“Go back three spaces”) and backyards.
Space. Indeed, that concept, tossed around with such casual authority, becomes trickier the more you think about it. In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard suggests that a shaky grasp of what we mean when we talk about “space” is connected with our frequent failure to apprehend the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed. And there’s far more purchase in Willard’s explication—too “theoretical” for the people in the pews, a pastor once told me—than in the fashionable diagnoses on offer at your local Christian bookstore.
So it was fitting that CIVA should make “Transforming Spaces: Virtu(e) and the Virtual” the theme of its 2007 conference, held last week at Messiah College in western Pennsylvania. Earl Tai spoke about distributive justice in the context of the “built and designed space.” Ena Heller gave a short history of MOBIA (the Museum of Biblical Art in America), a history attentive both to MOBIA’s location in Manhattan and to the cultural space it seeks to occupy. Ken Myers, in two lectures that bookended the conference, emphasized the contrast between an incarnational faith and a gnostic desire to escape from the body and its limitations—a temptation, Myers suggested, that keeps cropping up in new forms. Allan Wexler, who describes himself as an architect in an artist’s body, rang the changes on familiar spaces—the spaces of tables and chairs, ceilings and walls—with a mad deft witty virtuosity that made the world strange.
And so on, with more than enough fuel to energize anyone who didn’t sleepwalk through the conference. On the organizational front, CIVA is undergoing a major transition, as longtime leader and driving spirit Sandra Bowden stepped down. Her successor is Pat Jones, whose background is in marketing. What this will mean remains to be seen. Jones has an appealing passion for connecting artists with locals churches, all to the good. David Taylor, a pastor from Austin, led early morning worship that showed how fruitful such collaboration can be.
A panel discussion with audience participation the last day of the conference touched on another kind of space talk: centers of cultural power, Middle America (a bit like the Middle Ages, you know—the Dark Ages), and so on. (Some people, I should note in passing, have very quaint ideas about the Midwest, which is among other distinctions a center of the meth lab trade.) It was weird to hear this sort of thing (not representative of all the talk in that session, I hasten to add) near the end of a time dedicated to proposing alternatives to such unexamined clichés. Let a thousand flowers bloom, from Catherine Prescott’s portrait of the poet Scott Cairns (my single favorite piece in the exhibition that accompanied the conference) to whatever new art is stirring even at this moment in some unexpected space.
John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.
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