Art and Sacred Resistance: Art as Prayer, Love, Resistance and Relationship / Bruce Herman

“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 Bo