In working at the Harvard Bookstore, I am granted access to renting books out-and this one jumped out at me. A Harvard Divinity School professor, Jackson's "The Art Work" is a brilliant if dense academic perspective on religion and art making. It is full of spirit and food for thought.
"This process of alter-ation or existential transformation involves endless essays in striking a balance between being an actor and being acted upon...Rather than suffering our situations in solitude and silence, art, ritual and storytelling enable us to change the ways that our situations appear to us; we thereby come to feel that we possess some degree of free will, that the future is open rather than closed to us, and that our existence matters. In effect, we give birth to ourselves as proactive rather than merely passive participants in a shared world...
Art, sociality, and religion involve a negotiation between accepting at face value the social situations, aesthetic styles, normative values, and raw materials that are given to us and actively making something uniquely satisfying to ourselves out of these givens...
Like a sacrifice to the ancestors, an appeal to a divinity, a ritual to bring rain, a magnanimous gesture, or a conscientious act of parenting, the origins of a work of art cannot be fully fathomed....
...the meaning of all human experience remains ambiguous, containing within it both the seeds of its own comprehensibility and nuances and shadings that go beyond what can be comprehensively thought or said...
...the human well-being depends on a person's relationship with or connectedness to an 'elsewhere' or 'otherness' lying beyond the horizons of her own immediate lifeworld.
What is at play here is a struggle to bring some semblance of continuity, comprehension, and control to a person's relationship with known forces, both within and without.
...life is a continual interplay between what is latent (inchoate and invisible) and what is apparent (articulated and embodied)...
...that art, religion, ritual, dance and song are not essentially different phenomena but modalities, methods, or moments in which something hidden within is made manifest."
-M. Jackson, The Art Work