Anselm Society director Brian Brown wrote a piece for the summer 2018 issue of The Cultivating Project on the role of art and artists in spiritual formation. Excerpt:
Churches today honor the pastors and teachers who formally instruct us in the Scriptures, and the evangelists and missionaries who invite lost souls into the Church, and rightly so. But a Church characterized by a Christian imagination might also recognize and honor people who can play this vital role in teaching us what it feels like to live like we are fully human, not by telling, but by showing.
These people are not simply illustrators; people who put in visual form the things the pastor is saying this week or that we all learned in Sunday School. They are (or can be) co-laborers in a complex project, spiritual formation, the shaping of God’s people, that cannot be done properly without them.