Crucified Woman: Art and the Experience of Faith

Abstract

Art, as a prophetic reflection on the context in which we live, is an agent of transformation. In its power to look at the world, it calls us to transform that world. While often connected to or identified with the compelling power of beauty, art does not have to be beautiful to call us to see who we are. Paul Tillich taught that Protestantism requires us to look at the human situation in its depths of estrangement and despair; Artists see us in this way; they see and care who we are. They enable us to defend ourselves against destruction, or at least they warn us against it. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, for example, uses the traditional Latin requiem text, interspersed with various poems of the English soldier Wilfred Owen. The book's title page proclaims: 'My subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do today is warn.'