Sunday, August 31, 2025
Art Lover (Tired Museum Feet) (1956)
When I first encountered Art Lover (Tired Museum Feet) (1956), I was struck by its cleverness as a meta-work of art. It was art that acknowledged itself—art within art. The woman seated before the seascape became as much a subject as the crashing waves inside the gilt frame. Stevan Dohanos was not only presenting a painting, but also a performance of looking, the act of viewing itself made visible. This doubling effect recalled John Berger’s insight that “we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves” (Berger, 1972, p. 9). Dohanos positioned me as a double viewer: I looked at the woman looking at the sea. The humor, if there was any, was that my own tired museum feet were implicated—I, too, sat, gazed, and carried the fatigue of beauty.
On a personal level, I recognized myself in her posture. My brother, when we traveled, ensured that our days brimmed with activity. Museums, monuments, and side trips kept us always in motion. Inevitably, my body reminded me of its limits. Like her, I found myself metaphorically kicking off shoes and giving in to the weight of the day. Yet in those moments of fatigue, something unexpected occurred: I no longer skimmed across galleries as though they were items on an itinerary. Instead, I sat. I stared. I absorbed. The exhaustion of the body became a precondition for the contemplative stillness of the soul. The sublime, in Kant’s sense, was not experienced in haste. It required stillness, even surrender, to what overwhelmed. The sea within the painting—the vast, storm-tossed ocean—became a mirror for the limits of human reason. The woman, and I with her, were humbled before it (Kant, 1790/2000).
This juxtaposition of the mundane and the eternal—sore feet against infinite waves—was part of the humor but also the profundity of the piece. Kant distinguished between the beautiful (which charmed) and the sublime (which overwhelmed). Dohanos set them side by side: the beautiful gold frame and gallery tiles anchoring the work in a museum’s order, while the sublime storm surged within. The seated woman was the hinge between these realms, human enough to need rest, yet brave enough to confront the tumult.
What made the painting even more fascinating was its context. Like Rockwell, Dohanos painted for The Saturday Evening Post. His work did not reside only in the hushed halls of museums, but also on the covers of magazines tossed onto front porches and coffee tables. In this way, art was not cloistered but democratized. Berger (1972) noted that “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe” (p. 8). To encounter Dohanos’s work on a magazine cover was to believe that art belonged in ordinary life, that the sublime was not the privilege of the elite but the inheritance of the many. Illustration in mid-century America was not simply commercial; it was cultural, shaping the nation’s visual imagination as profoundly as any oil on canvas hanging in a gallery.
I had seen Rockwell’s paintings in person, and their precision was astonishing. The reproductions I carried in memory did not prepare me for the subtlety of brushwork or the depth of color. I suspected Dohanos was no different. These illustrators, often treated as second-tier in the hierarchy of art history, were in fact consummate craftsmen of narrative and atmosphere. They invited millions into the practice of looking, of seeing themselves in relation to art, without the intimidating trappings of exclusivity.
In the end, Art Lover (Tired Museum Feet) was not simply humorous. It was philosophical. It suggested that fatigue and sublimity often arrived hand in hand, that to truly see, one sometimes had to surrender the pace of life. It reminded me that art was most alive when it was accessible—when even the tired traveler with sore feet could pause, look up, and for a moment lose themselves in a sea larger than themselves.
References
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.
Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the power of judgment (P. Guyer, Ed., & P. Guyer & E. Matthews, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1790)
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Friday, August 29, 2025
Happy Birthday, Brother!
From Mexico...
To Canada...
And all points in between...
Happy Birthday, little brother.
Essay 10 - A Way of Life
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Introduction
To say I am religious but not spiritual is to invite confusion. Some assume it is a contradiction; others think it means I have exchanged one form of superstition for another. In truth, it is neither. It is a way of living that grounds life in ritual, community, responsibility, and beauty without appealing to the supernatural. Where spirituality often seeks private experience, I look instead to shared practices and public forms. Where religion is often defined by belief, I emphasize discipline and belonging.
This essay is not another defense of naturalism or critique of doctrine. Those arguments have been made. What I want to offer here is a practical account: how to live religious but not spiritual in daily life, how to respond to those who may not understand it, and why such a way of life is not only coherent but also deeply fulfilling. My claim is simple: to live religiously without spirituality is to treat human practices as sacred, not because they transcend the world but because they bind us more deeply into it.
Ritual as Foundation
To live religious but not spiritual begins with ritual. This is often where people misunderstand. They hear “ritual” and imagine hollow repetition, meaningless superstition, or practices done only because a god demands them. Yet ritual is not about obedience to the supernatural; it is about shaping life with intention. It is the difference between drifting through a day and inhabiting it fully.
For me, rituals are small but deliberate. Brewing coffee in the quiet of morning. Feeding my cats before the workday begins. Standing before a classroom door, taking a breath, and choosing to welcome students with steadiness. None of these require divine command, but all of them ground me. They give the day rhythm, they provide continuity through change, and they remind me that even the most ordinary actions can be performed with care. To live religiously without being spiritual is, at its heart, to accept that the sacred is not elsewhere but here — in habits that make life livable.
When I describe this to others, they sometimes respond, “But isn’t that just routine?” I answer that routine becomes ritual when it is done with intention. A person can gulp down coffee absentmindedly or they can measure the grounds, wait for the water to pour, and treat the moment as a pause before the noise of the day. Both acts are “making coffee,” but only one acknowledges the power of repetition to center the self. Ritual is routine made deliberate.
Psychologists like William James and philosophers like Aristotle recognized long ago that habits shape character. We are, as Aristotle wrote, what we repeatedly do. To live religiously is to choose habits that align with meaning — not because the universe will bless them, but because they will bless the one who lives them. Others may not understand why I speak of brewing coffee or teaching a class as “religious,” but I explain that these rituals are my liturgy. They are the patterns through which I find grounding.
This is also why ritual provides fullness. Life without rhythm feels scattered; life without anchoring practices feels fragile. Ritual does not erase fragility, but it steadies it. It is how I carry both joy and grief, how I honor memory while embracing change. At my grandparents’ Sunday table, when my grandfather died, the ritual did not end. We rearranged the seats. I took his place. That simple act was ritual at its purest: continuity in the midst of loss. Others might call it tradition or habit, but for me, it was sacred because it bound me to my family and gave shape to grief.
To live religious but not spiritual, then, is to begin each day with ritual. It is to recognize that these practices — whether at a family table, in a classroom, or in a stadium — are not trivial repetitions but acts that anchor the self in time. They do not point beyond the world; they bind us to it. In ritual, life becomes not just something endured but something shaped.
Community Without Supernaturalism
If ritual provides the rhythm of individual life, community gives that rhythm its resonance. To live religious but not spiritual is to recognize that meaning is never mine alone; it is forged and sustained with others. Yet this is often where I meet the most resistance. People hear me describe myself as “religious” and assume I mean membership in a church or loyalty to a creed. When I clarify that I reject supernatural belief but embrace communal forms, they are puzzled. “Why stay religious at all?” they ask. My answer is simple: because community matters, and religion is one of humanity’s oldest tools for binding people together.
For me, institutions such as schools, museums, and councils are every bit as sacred as churches or monasteries. They preserve memory, cultivate belonging, and create spaces where individuals can serve something larger than themselves. The rhythm of a school day — bells, classes, conversations, closing reflections — functions like liturgy. The agenda of a city council — motions, votes, roll calls — has the patterned regularity of ritual. A museum exhibition, carefully curated, is a collective act of remembrance. None of these require divine authority, yet all of them shape communal life with the gravity that others might call sacred.
Explaining this to others requires patience. Many equate sacredness with God, and when I say that classrooms or council chambers are my sanctuaries, they hear metaphor. But I mean it literally. Sacredness, to me, lies in practices that sustain belonging and responsibility. When we gather in ritual — whether around a family table or under stadium lights — we are enacting the same instinct that built temples and cathedrals. Religion, without the supernatural, is still the name for these patterned forms of life together.
Community without supernaturalism is not less meaningful; it is more practical. It does not depend on assent to doctrines or metaphysical claims. It depends only on participation, memory, and care. When I sit with colleagues to discuss how best to serve students, or when I vote in a council chamber to shape the life of a city, I am living religiously. The sacred is present in the very fact that people gather, deliberate, and decide how to live together.
This approach also brings fullness. To be religious but not spiritual is to resist the temptation of pure individualism — the idea that meaning can be built in isolation. Instead, it insists that life gains weight in shared practice. The rituals of a classroom, the traditions of a family table, the public liturgies of democracy: these are not mere procedures. They are the ways we affirm that we belong to one another.
Living this way sometimes requires explaining to others that rejecting supernaturalism does not mean rejecting community. In fact, it means cherishing community more urgently. Without illusions of divine guarantee, the responsibility to sustain our institutions and relationships falls squarely on us. That responsibility is not a burden but a gift. It is the recognition that the sacred is not bestowed from heaven but created in the fragile work of living together.
Morality Without Absolutes
One of the most common questions I hear when I describe myself as religious but not spiritual is, “Without God, where do your morals come from?” The assumption is that ethics must be anchored in divine command, and that without supernatural authority, life collapses into relativism. But I have found the opposite to be true. Morality without absolutes is not weaker; it is stronger, because it places responsibility squarely on human shoulders.
Living religious but not spiritual means accepting that good and evil are fragile human constructs, not eternal decrees. Nature itself is amoral: floods, viruses, and earthquakes are not punishments from the heavens but natural events. Suffering exists not because someone “allowed it” but because the world is complex and often cruel. In this framework, morality is not about appeasing a divine will but about creating conditions where people can live with dignity. The question is not “What does God require?” but “What kind of society do we want to build?”
Practically, this means ethics must be lived as a daily discipline. As a teacher, I cannot rely on commandments carved into stone to guide my classroom. Instead, I model fairness, cultivate compassion, and create space for honesty. When I sit with a struggling student, or when I choose to tell the truth even when it is costly, I am practicing morality without absolutes. It is fragile — one wrong decision can fray trust — but it is real.
Explaining this to others requires honesty. I often say: divine law has justified slavery, oppression, and exclusion in the past, but human beings revised those laws when they recognized the cruelty within them. What endures is not divine decree but human responsibility. We can see this in history: values such as fairness, reciprocity, and compassion reappear across cultures not because they descend from heaven, but because they “work.” They enable survival, cooperation, and flourishing.
This way of living is practical because it demands vigilance. Absolutism tempts us into complacency — if morality is fixed and eternal, then it cannot fail. But if morality is human, it must be renewed with every generation. Each choice matters, each injustice resisted, each act of compassion preserved. Living religious but not spiritual means treating morality as liturgy: a repeated practice that does not guarantee perfection but sustains the fragile fabric of justice.
Fullness emerges here too. Knowing that morality is ours to make does not diminish its power; it magnifies it. Every act of kindness is significant because it is not guaranteed. Every choice for justice matters because it could have gone otherwise. To live ethically without absolutes is to recognize that the moral arc does not bend on its own — we bend it. And in bending it, we take part in the sacred work of being human together.
Facing Mortality and Mystery
To live religious but not spiritual is also to live with death always near. Many traditions soften mortality with promises of heaven, reincarnation, or reunion beyond the grave. I do not share those beliefs. For me, death is final: the cessation of breath, the breaking down of the body, the end of consciousness. Yet far from emptying life of meaning, this recognition deepens it. Mortality is not an interruption but a frame, reminding me that each act, each word, each relationship must be tended now, while I still have time.
This perspective is not always easy to explain. When others ask, “But don’t you want to believe you’ll see loved ones again?” I tell them I honor my loved ones not by imagining their return, but by remembering them fully. When I visit a grave with my brother and leave coins on the stone, I am practicing a ritual that holds memory in place. It does not deny the finality of death, but it refuses to let the dead vanish into silence. Memory becomes the social afterlife — the way a life continues in story, in gesture, in the habits carried forward by those who remain.
Mystery plays its part here as well. To reject supernatural claims is not to claim mastery over all knowledge. Quite the opposite: it is to live with reverence for what I cannot know. The future is a mystery, as is much of the past. Even my own mind — the unconscious, the surge of emotion, the spark of creativity — remains a frontier. To live religious but not spiritual is to honor mystery not by projecting gods into it, but by treating it as a horizon. I do not need certainty to feel reverence; I need humility.
This approach is practical because it resists both denial and despair. Denial pretends that death is not real, while despair insists that death renders life meaningless. The middle path — the religious but not spiritual path — accepts death as part of life’s rhythm. This acceptance sharpens gratitude. It makes the morning coffee more precious, the family table more sacred, the classroom conversation more urgent. Each of these moments carries weight because it cannot be repeated forever.
Fullness arises precisely from this fragility. To know that my time is short is to savor what is given. To recognize mystery as permanent is to stay open, curious, and humble. I may not solve the riddle of consciousness or the universe, but I can live in awe of it. As the Stoics reminded their students, to remember death is to live better. To live religious but not spiritual is to turn mortality and mystery into companions — not enemies to be defeated, but teachers that keep me attentive to the life I have.
The Sacred Ordinary
To live religious but not spiritual is finally to see beauty as sacred, even when it arises from human hands alone. For centuries, cathedrals, icons, and sacred music have been treated as proof of divine inspiration. I see them differently: not as evidence of God, but as evidence of us — our capacity to lift ordinary materials into forms that inspire reverence. Stone, glass, paint, song: these are human elements transformed by human imagination into something that transcends mere utility.
This same impulse is not confined to churches. I have stood in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, where mosaics glitter like galaxies, and I have stood in the Guardian Building in Detroit, a skyscraper built for finance, where color and form create the same awe. One is sacred, the other secular, but both testify to the human instinct to make beauty a vessel of meaning. When I explain this to others, I tell them: beauty is religion’s greatest proof, not of God’s existence, but of humanity’s longing to live in a world worthy of reverence.
The sacred ordinary extends far beyond architecture. Bread and wine at a table, water poured for a child, light slanting through a window — these are ordinary things that religion has taught us to see differently. To be religious but not spiritual is to continue that work without claiming the supernatural. Bread is still communion when shared with gratitude; water is still renewal when received with intention. Even the smallest rituals — pouring coffee, lighting a candle, gathering at a stadium — can take on sacred character when treated with attention.
Art carries this further by transforming suffering into beauty. The crucifix, painted and sculpted in endless variations, is not beautiful because a god ordained it, but because humans refused to let suffering be meaningless. Buddhist mandalas, Jewish psalms, African American spirituals — each is a cultural act of taking pain, hope, or longing and turning it into form. When I look at Rembrandt’s Head of Christ or hear the swell of a gospel choir, I do not ask whether divinity has touched them. I see, instead, humanity lifting its own fragility into vision.
Living this way is practical because it provides fullness without illusion. Awe does not depend on miracles; it depends on perception. To walk into a museum, to hear a symphony, to watch light shift across the floor of a classroom — all of these can be sacred encounters if entered with care. Others may insist that sacredness requires belief in the supernatural, but I answer that sacredness is what happens when humans treat something as worthy of reverence. And that can happen anywhere: in a basilica, in a skyscraper, at a family table, or in the quiet act of making coffee.
To be religious but not spiritual, then, is to live with eyes open to the sacred ordinary. It is to let art, ritual, and beauty remind me that life, though fragile and finite, is rich beyond measure. The fullness of this way of life lies not in promises of eternity but in the recognition that here and now, in the very human world we share, there is more than enough to revere.
In Closing
To live religious but not spiritual is not to withdraw from life but to enter it more fully. It is to let ritual anchor the day, to let community shape responsibility, to let morality be practiced without illusions, to face death with honesty, and to find beauty in the ordinary. This way of life does not offer escape from fragility; it insists that fragility itself is what makes meaning possible.
For those who wonder how such a life can provide fullness, my answer is this: it asks nothing impossible of us. It asks only that we attend to what is already here — the tables where we gather, the institutions we sustain, the art we create, the relationships we honor. These are enough. To be religious without being spiritual is to see that life does not require otherworldly guarantees to be sacred. It requires only our willingness to treat the ordinary with reverence and to carry one another with care.
References
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.
Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean ethics (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Batoche Books. (Original work published ca. 350 BCE)
Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.
Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Scribner. (Original work published 1923)
Camus, A. (1991). The myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Vintage International. (Original work published 1942)
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Durkheim, É. (1995). The elementary forms of religious life (K. E. Fields, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1912)
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. Basic Books.
James, W. (2002). The varieties of religious experience. Dover Publications. (Original work published 1902)
Jung, C. G. (1964). Modern man in search of a soul (W. S. Dell & C. F. Baynes, Trans.). Harvest Books. (Original work published 1933)
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics. Human Relations, 1(1), 5–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674700100103
Maslow, A. H. (1964). Religions, values, and peak-experiences. Ohio State University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2001). The gay science (J. Nauckhoff, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1882)
Popper, K. (2013). The open society and its enemies (New one-volume ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1945)
Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative, Volume 1 (K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Rilke, R. M. (1993). Letters to a young poet (M. D. Herter Norton, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1903)
Sartre, J.-P. (1993). Being and nothingness (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Washington Square Press. (Original work published 1943)
Seneca. (1969). Letters from a Stoic (R. Campbell, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published ca. 65 CE)
Thursday, August 28, 2025
La Grande Baigneuse (1808)
Every time I walk into a museum, I find myself stopping in the same place: where there is a butt. Sometimes it is a bronze figure, polished smooth by centuries of admiring touches. Sometimes it is marble, glowing under gallery lights. And sometimes, as with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ La Grande Baigneuse (1808), it is oil on canvas, a curve caught forever in paint. I am not, as people say, a “butt man.” I simply find the human form endlessly fascinating. And if we’re honest, butts are funny.
There is something irresistibly comic about them. Mark Twain once quipped, “The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” In front of a painting like this, I sometimes wonder if that weapon isn’t just the sight of ourselves from behind. The butt has a built-in levity. It wiggles, it jiggles, it is the seat of slapstick and the source of many jokes. Comedians have known this forever—Charlie Chaplin falling on his rear, or Groucho Marx’s crack about “behind every successful man is a woman, and behind her is his wife.” The humor arises because the butt is the most ordinary of parts, one we all share, yet to see it isolated and displayed in polished marble or in the idealized smoothness of Ingres’ brush makes it absurd in its elevation.
But the laughter does not cancel the beauty. If anything, it sharpens it. Ingres’ bather sits poised, her body turned away from us, her face obscured by a turban, so that the eye is drawn unavoidably to the expanse of her back and the soft roundness below. The paint is so smooth that it seems to deny fleshiness itself, a porcelain sheen that transforms the body into an ideal. And yet, it is not the stern beauty of Apollo, nor the coldness of marble—it is soft, intimate, strangely vulnerable. As if the act of turning her back exposes not only her body but her humanness.
I think of Oscar Wilde’s line: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” Ingres knew what he was doing. He gave us the appearance of flesh in such a way that we cannot help but dwell on it. There is reverence here, not only for the erotic but for the form itself—the way skin stretches over bone, the way weight bends a mattress, the way one curve leads into another. To laugh at a butt is to affirm it, and to affirm it is to acknowledge the beauty of being embodied.
Psychologists remind us that humor and beauty often emerge from the same source: incongruity. The body is both ridiculous and sublime. The philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote, “Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast.” The butt is perhaps the perfect illustration of Pascal’s paradox. It is base, earthy, comical. And yet in the hands of an artist, it becomes angelic. We look at it and find ourselves laughing and longing in the same breath.
This is why I always stop where there is a butt in the gallery. It is not only funny, though it is that too. It is also beautiful in its ordinariness, in its refusal to be anything but what it is. A butt is a reminder that art, like life, is about embodiment. It is about carrying weight, about being seen, about the strange dignity of flesh. And perhaps this is why Ingres chose not to show us the bather’s face. Faces lie; faces pretend. But the back and the curve of the hip, those are honest. They tell us what it means to be human.
Or, to borrow the comedian Steve Martin’s simple wisdom: “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.” A gallery without butts is like, you know, missing something essential.
Essay 9 - The Human Face of Beauty
Introduction
The most beautiful building I have ever entered is the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. Its mosaics shimmer like galaxies fixed into stone, light catching on millions of tiny fragments to form a vision of the sacred. Standing there, I felt no need to summon belief in God; the beauty itself was enough. Human hands had made this wonder, layering devotion into glass and mortar until the whole building seemed to sing.
I have felt something similar in places that were never meant as houses of worship. The Guardian Building in Detroit — a skyscraper dedicated to finance — rises in Art Deco splendor, its arches and murals as grand as any cathedral. Both structures, one sacred and one secular, bear witness to the same human instinct: to give form to our highest values through beauty. Religion has been one of the richest vessels for that instinct, not because it proves the divine, but because it reveals the human capacity to create what inspires reverence.
The Absent Christ
The Gospels never tell us what Jesus looked like. There is no description of his height, his hair, his eyes, or his voice. The writers did not think it important — or perhaps they assumed everyone already knew, or perhaps they believed his words and actions mattered more than his appearance. Whatever the reason, the effect was profound: Jesus entered history without a face. That silence left a blank canvas for the imagination of centuries, and Christians, artists, and cultures have been painting upon it ever since.
As a naturalist, I hold only a few convictions about Jesus himself. I believe he was a real person, a first-century Jew who lived and died under Roman rule. I believe he was an apocalyptic prophet, proclaiming that the kingdom of God was near. My own suspicion — though it can never be proven — is that he was a Pharisee, a voice within that interpretive and legal tradition. Beyond those few points, everything else is conjecture. The Jesus who comforts, terrifies, inspires, or consoles — that Jesus is not the Jesus of history but the Jesus of art, literature, and culture.
And so the earliest depictions of Jesus bear little resemblance to one another. In the Roman catacombs, he appears as a youthful figure, clean-shaven, often carrying a lamb on his shoulders. He is the Good Shepherd, drawn from parable and rendered with tenderness. Sometimes he resembles a magician, working wonders with a wand. This Jesus reflected the needs of a community still forming its identity: a protector, a wonder-worker, someone close enough to touch.
As Christianity moved into the Byzantine world, the face of Christ changed. He became the bearded philosopher, stern yet compassionate, haloed with divine authority. Icons portrayed him not as one of many shepherds but as Pantocrator, ruler of all. His eyes seemed to follow the worshipper across the space of the church, demanding reverence. Here was Jesus as wisdom incarnate, reflecting the culture’s values of stability, authority, and the marriage of Greek philosophy with Christian theology.
Later still, Renaissance artists gave him pale skin and European features, embodying their own ideals. Modern depictions expand the gallery even further: the Black Christ of liberation theology, the Indigenous Christ of the Americas, the androgynous Christ who embodies universality, even the muscular “quarterback Christ” of American revivalism. Each portrait reveals less about Jesus of Nazareth and more about the culture that needed him. With no fixed features, he becomes endlessly adaptable, a mirror for our hopes and fears. We need God to look like us, to carry our burdens and embody our ideals. The absent Christ becomes the human face of beauty — created by us, for us.
The Beauty of Suffering
If the Gospels gave us no description of Jesus’s face, they gave us plenty of detail about his death. The crucifixion, described with brutal clarity, became the most enduring image of Christian art. For the first generations of Christians, it was too shameful to depict — the Romans reserved crucifixion for the lowest of criminals, and to honor a crucified man was scandalous. But over time, the cross shifted from disgrace to glory. By the Middle Ages, it dominated cathedrals, icons, and altarpieces. Today, no other image of Jesus is as recognizable as the crucifix: the body nailed to wood, the suffering made visible.
Why do we need this image? Why, out of all the stories of his life — the healings, the parables, the resurrection — is this the one we cannot stop reproducing? I believe it is because suffering is the most universal human experience. We do not all preach or perform miracles, but we all suffer. To see Christ on the cross is to see our own pain reflected back at us — sanctified, made meaningful, lifted into the realm of beauty. Religious art lingers on the crucifixion not to shock us but to console us, teaching that anguish can be borne, that it belongs to something larger than ourselves.
This is not only a Christian instinct. In Buddhism, the very first of the Four Noble Truths states simply that “life is suffering.” Suffering is not an accident or interruption of life but its most basic condition. The task of religion, East and West alike, has often been to help us face this reality without despair. Where Buddhism offers the path of mindfulness and compassion, Christianity offers the crucifix. Both traditions recognize that to be human is to ache, to lose, to die — and both have created beauty to help us endure.
Each culture reimagined the crucifix to suit its own needs. Medieval artists emphasized torment: blood flowing from wounds, ribs straining through flesh, eyes closed in agony. These images taught endurance: if Christ suffered so terribly, then so must we. Later depictions softened the scene, showing Christ serene even in death, his hands more open in blessing than in pain. In Latin America, the crucifix became a symbol of solidarity with the oppressed: Christ suffering with the poor, his body bound to their bodies. In African American churches, a Black Christ on the cross stood as a sign that God knew intimately the pain of injustice. Each crucifix is both local and universal, particular and shared.
What is most striking is how art turns pain into beauty. The Isenheim Altarpiece shows a Christ so grotesque in his suffering that it seems unbearable — yet the very scale and detail of the painting compels awe. Salvador DalÃ’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross reimagines the crucifixion as a geometric dream, Christ floating in impossible perspective. Both works unsettle and inspire, showing how human creativity transforms anguish into vision. In this way, crucifix art is not only devotional but deeply artistic: it makes suffering bearable by turning it into something luminous.
For me, this is the clearest example of religion as human art. As a naturalist, I believe Jesus was crucified under Roman authority — an execution like countless others in history. What makes his death different is not divine mandate but the way humans have chosen to depict it. The crucifix is beautiful not because God ordained it but because people, confronted with their own pain, refused to let suffering be meaningless. They made art of it. They lifted it into beauty. Just as Buddhism teaches that suffering is the root of life, Christianity shows how suffering can be shaped into meaning. Religion, at its best, does not erase suffering but transforms it, reminding us that our wounds can still give rise to wonder.
Prophets and Saints
If the crucifixion shows our need to see God share in our suffering, then the saints, prophets, and holy figures reveal another instinct: our need for companions and exemplars. Human beings have rarely been satisfied with a distant or abstract divinity. We want intermediaries — people close enough to us to feel real, but holy enough to inspire us. Saints in Christianity, bodhisattvas in Buddhism, prophets in Judaism and Islam, demigods in the ancient world: each tradition populates its gallery with figures who stand between heaven and earth. Their presence tells us that the sacred must not only rule but also walk among us.
What strikes me is how these figures are portrayed as embodiments of beauty. The golden icons of Orthodox saints, the radiant statues of Hindu gods, the intricate mandalas that depict bodhisattvas — all present holiness as something luminous. Even when ascetics are remembered for their austerity, like the Desert Fathers, their sayings and stories carry an austere beauty of paradox and simplicity. “Go sit in your cell,” one saying goes, “and your cell will teach you everything.” These fragments are not arguments but art, phrases honed into the beauty of wisdom.
In literature, the saints and prophets often appear less as remote figures than as voices we can still hear. Kahlil Gibran’s Jesus, Son of Man is a perfect example. Written as a series of fictional testimonies from people who might have encountered Jesus — disciples, bystanders, even enemies — it presents a Christ refracted through many human perspectives. The book is not history but art: a chorus of voices shaping Jesus into poetry. What matters is not whether Gibran’s characters really lived, but the beauty of their imagined witness. In his The Prophet and The Madman, too, Gibran crafts spiritual wisdom in lyrical form, blending parable with poetry. His works endure because they make religion beautiful, not because they make it provable.
The same can be said of saints’ lives written across centuries. The Vitae of martyrs, miracle-workers, and visionaries were often embroidered with legend — dragons slain, voices heard, wonders performed. Their purpose was not to satisfy modern historians but to inspire the imagination of ordinary believers. Each story was an act of religious art, shaping ideals of courage, devotion, and compassion. These tales filled the gap between doctrine and daily life, showing not only what to believe but how to live beautifully.
When I read these works or stand before these images, I do not feel compelled to ask whether they are historically accurate. Their power lies elsewhere. They are works of human creativity, crafted to make holiness visible and desirable. The saints, prophets, and holy figures are mirrors in which we glimpse our best selves: courageous, faithful, enduring. They are beautiful not because they are divine, but because humans have made them so. Religion here is less about metaphysical truth than about aesthetic truth: the ability of story and image to inspire us to live more fully.
The Aesthetics of the Everyday
Not all beauty in religion is monumental. Sometimes it appears in the simplest things: a ray of light through a window, a circle painted around a head, a loaf of bread on a table. What distinguishes the religious imagination is its ability to notice the ordinary and declare it holy. We call the slanting shafts of sunlight “godrays,” halos of brightness that seem to descend from beyond, though we know they are only the play of light and dust. We paint those same halos around the heads of saints, not because their skulls glow, but because we want to see their wisdom and compassion made visible.
This impulse reaches into the objects of daily life. Bread and wine, the most common elements of a Mediterranean meal, become the Eucharist. Water, necessary for survival, becomes baptismal. Fire, so ordinary in a lamp or hearth, becomes the eternal flame at a shrine. In each case, what is striking is not the object itself but the transformation of perception. We see more than flour and grapes; we see communion. We see more than water; we see new life. Religion has always been the art of taking what is at hand and lifting it into beauty.
Architecture and ritual amplify this transformation. A candle flickering in a dark church feels different from the same flame in a kitchen. Incense wafting through a sanctuary feels different from smoke rising from a campfire. The objects are the same, but the frame changes them. By gathering together, by telling stories, by repeating gestures, communities turn the everyday into the sacred. Religion teaches us not just what to look at, but how to look — how to see the world as charged with meaning.
This aesthetic of the ordinary is not confined to religion, of course. A sunset, a garden, a family meal can stir the same reverence. But religion codifies and sustains these experiences, building rituals that ensure they are remembered and shared. The “godrays” we name in nature become the halos in art, and eventually the light in stained glass. What begins as perception becomes tradition, and tradition becomes beauty carried across centuries.
For me, this is one of the most compelling reasons to remain religious without being spiritual. I do not need to believe that light beams are divine or that bread turns into flesh. What matters is that humans have found ways to make these simple things beautiful, to lift the ordinary into art. This is religion as aesthetic practice: the transformation of the everyday into symbols that inspire us. The power lies not in heaven blessing these objects, but in human imagination choosing to see them differently.
The Head of Christ
In the 1640s, in a workshop once thought to be Rembrandt’s, a series of small paintings known as the Heads of Christ were produced for private devotion. One of these survives in a Flemish collection: a tender portrait of a man with soft features, olive-toned skin, and thoughtful eyes turned slightly away. It is not the triumphant Pantocrator of Byzantine mosaics or the muscular redeemer of the Renaissance. Instead, it is quiet, intimate, and approachable — a face meant for prayer. The painter may not have known what Jesus looked like, but he knew what believers wanted: a savior who seemed near, human, and compassionate.
I find myself drawn to this face. Unlike the grand mosaics of a basilica or the monumental crucifixes of medieval altars, this image is small enough to hold in a private room. It is a Christ not enthroned but encountered. The tenderness of the portrait suggests that holiness can reside not only in glory but in gentleness. It is art designed to meet the viewer’s gaze and whisper that the divine is not beyond reach.
In this way, the Head of Christ of the 1640s is not so different from Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ of 1940. Sallman’s Jesus — reproduced in the tens of millions — became the face of American Protestant devotion, appearing in classrooms, kitchens, and chapels. His Jesus was light-skinned, soft-haired, and deeply American in character, a cultural construct as much as a theological one. And yet it, too, served the same purpose as the older painting: to give believers a face they could look toward, a form they could love.
Neither painting gives us the historical Jesus. As a naturalist, I believe Jesus was a Jewish prophet crucified under Roman authority, likely with features very different from either of these portraits. But both the Flemish devotional image and Sallman’s mid-century Jesus reveal something more important than history: our human longing to imagine the sacred in forms that look like us, to turn our yearning into beauty. They are mirrors of culture, not windows into fact — and that is precisely what makes them powerful.
For me, these portraits remind me that religion’s greatest gift is not certainty but art. In them I do not see God revealing himself to humanity; I see humanity revealing itself through God. The sacredness of these works does not come from divine authority but from their ability to inspire tenderness, reverence, and belonging. The Head of Christ, whether in a Dutch workshop or an American print shop, is beautiful not because it tells us who Jesus was, but because it shows us who we are and what we most need to see: a face turned toward us in compassion.
In Closing
The Basilica mosaics, the Guardian Building, and even a modest Head of Christ on a small panel or a Sunday school wall share a common thread. They are all works of human imagination that take what is ordinary — stone, glass, paint, story — and shape it into something that moves us beyond ourselves. They remind me that the sacred is not given from above but made here, among us, through the art we create.
To be religious but not spiritual is, for me, to honor this work. I do not look to these mosaics, portraits, or poems as proof of God’s existence. I look to them as proof of ours. In their beauty, I see humanity’s greatest achievement: the ability to make meaning visible, to embody longing in art, to transform suffering into vision. Beauty is our divinity, not because it descends from heaven, but because it rises from human hands and endures in human hearts.
References
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Gibran, K. (1996). The prophet. Alfred A. Knopf. (Original work published 1923)
Gibran, K. (1971). The madman: His parables and poems. Alfred A. Knopf. (Original work published 1918)
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