Some of you might enjoy my latest Image essay, “Confessions of a Gnostic Reader.” Here’s an excerpt:
“You needn’t be theologian or historian to grasp gnosticism: disdain for the flesh, and a faith that there are secret, spiritual understandings that only the smartest and best flesh despisers can divine. It’s a spirit very much alive in modern American churches, and it’s in keeping with what many outside the church think the church really is.
It is, further, the reason many of us—especially artists—stay away from churches, out of a sense that our whole art, the wrought fusion of spirit and mind and body, is unwelcome, devalued, suspect. Art is the rendering—and rending—of heart and soul in physical space, and so the artist is never really at home in places where physicality is decried.”
