Ordinary Saints pushes against the modern, reductionist mindset to proclaim the full-orbed, Creation-to-Redemption Gospel.
This mini-retreat will focus on art and beauty: God’s gift to a weary world.
Featuring sessions with Bruce Herman, Malcolm Guite, and J.A.C. Redford. Music by the Brian Piper Jazz Trio and others, poetry readings, and Compline. Lunch and dinner are included as well as a light breakfast. Space is limited.
This event is inspired by an installation at PCPC featuring 20 portraits by painter Bruce Herman. The art is richly adorned by a collection of poems by Malcolm Guite and music by J.A.C. Redford both created in response to the art.
Colossians 1:15-20 says, “all things were created through Him and for Him.” God richly displays His handiwork in every part of the created order. The faces in Ordinary Saints (and the faces around us) convey the embodied glory of God—a tangible gift, a reflection of the Divine—something truly extraordinary. Here, beauty is on lavish display. The church has often communicated an ignorance or ambivalence about beauty, aesthetics, and serious art forms. The Ordinary Saints project helps us participate in the recovery of the church’s historical role as purveyors of beauty through great art.
From the first moment that He proclaims the Kingdom of God,
Jesus appeals to our imagination.
He makes that appeal through the parables of the Kingdom,
the paradoxes of the gospel, the…signs He gave in His miracles…
those moments when the heavens open and the ordinary is transfigured,
seen in an utterly new light. — Malcolm Guite
Date: Saturday, March 26th, 2022
Time: Sessions: 9:00 A.M.—3:00 P.M. | Concert and Compline: 6:00 P.M. — 9:00 P.M.
Location: Park Cities Presbyterian Church | 4124 Oak Lawn Ave, Dallas, TX 75219
Admission: $40 | Scholarships are available | All tickets include breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Bruce Herman Biography
Bruce Herman’s art has been exhibited in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and most major cities in the U.S.A. and abroad in Italy, England, Israel, Japan, and Hong Kong. Herman’s art is in many public and private art collections––among these, the Vatican Museums in Rome, the Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts, and the Hammer Museum Grunewald Print Collection in L.A.
Herman’s art and writings are published in a thirty-year retrospective in Through Your Eyes (2013). His published essays are found in many print and online journals including IMAGE, Comment, Books and Culture, and many others.
Herman has taught for three decades and curated over 100 exhibitions for Gordon College. He holds the endowed Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts at the school, and is Gallery Director and Art Collection manager there.
Malcolm Guite Biography
Poet-Priest Malcolm Guite is Chaplain and Supernumerary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and teaches at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He lectures widely in England and North America on Theology and Literature, and has published poetry, theology, literary criticism, and librettos. His books include: Love, Remember (November 2017); Mariner, a spiritual biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (February 2017); Parable and Paradox (2016); The Singing Bowl (2013); Sounding the Seasons (2012); Theology and the Poetic Imagination (2010); and Faith, Hope, and Poetry (2006). Malcolm has edited two poetry anthologies for Lent and Advent: The Word in the Wilderness (2014) and Waiting on the Word (2015). Malcolm writes Poet’s Corner, a weekly column in the Church Times, and an anthology of his column’s writings, In Every Corner Sing, was published in November 2019.
Malcolm has a particular interest in the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty and continues to reflect deeply on how poetry can stimulate and re-awaken our prayer life.
Malcolm enjoys sailing, walking, old books, live music, riding his Harley Davidson motorbike, and all the varieties of the British countryside and weather. Malcolm is also part of the rock band Mystery Train, regularly performing gigs at Grantchester, Cambridge, and other places around Cambridgeshire.
J.A.C Redford Biography
J.A.C. Redford is a composer, arranger, orchestrator, and conductor of concert, chamber, and choral music, film, television and theater scores, and music for recordings. His music has been featured on programs at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., the Lincoln Center in New York, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Redford has written the scores for more than three dozen feature films and TV miniseries including The Trip to Bountiful, One Night with the King, What the Deaf Man Heard, Mama Flora’s Family, and Disney’s Oliver & Company, Newsies, and The Mighty Ducks II and III. He has composed the music for nearly 500 episodes of series television, including multiple seasons of Coach and St. Elsewhere (for which he received two Emmy nominations).
He has produced, arranged, and conducted music for the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and served as a consultant for the Sundance Film Institute, a teacher in the Artists-in-Schools program for the National Endowment for the Arts, a guest lecturer at USC and UCLA, and on the Music Branch Executive Committees for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.