Art and the Divine, Pt 2; Reading a Story, Pt 2

Our passage from the Word of God today is Jeremiah 30:2 which reads: "Thus speaketh the Lord God of Israel, saying, Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book."

Our quote today is from Gene Veith. He said: "One thing, however, is certain: Reading can never die out among Christians.  This is because the whole Christian revelation centers around a Book.  God chose to reveal Himself to us in the most personal way through His Word—the Bible."

Our first topic for today is "Art and the Divine, Part 2" from the book, "Literature and Spirituality" by Yaw Adu-Gyamfi and Mark Ray Schmidt.

This artistic expansion of our selves through new connections can come in many forms: empathizing with the emotions of characters in an ancient drama, a sense of awe when viewing a landscape painting, or a sense of fear when a short-story character walks into a dark, mysterious room. Art enriches our lives with all sorts of new connections. 

But what is the relationship between art and the spiritual? Before we can solve that question, we need to ask, what is the spiritual? The term spiritual is often associated with "the beyond;" it is associated with truths and experiences which transcend our immediate experiences. When we are aware of the spiritual, we are discovering unique connections, just as art helps us discover new connections.

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Our second topic for today is "Reading a Story, Part 2" from the book, "Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing" by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia.

The Art of Fiction

Fiction (from the Latin fictio, "a shaping, a counterfeiting") is a name for stories not entirely factual, but at least partially shaped, made up, imagined. It is true that in some fiction, such as a historical novel, a writer draws on factual information in presenting scenes, events, and characters. But the factual information in a historical novel, unlike that in a history book, is of secondary importance.

Many firsthand accounts of the American Civil War were written by men who had fought in it, but few eyewitnesses give us so keen a sense of actual life on the battlefront as the author of "The Red Badge of Courage", Stephen Crane, who was born after the war was over. In fiction, the "facts" may or may not be true, and a story is none the worse for their being entirely imaginary. We expect from fiction a sense of how people act, not an authentic chronicle of how, at some past time, a few people acted.

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