ZEDS Blog


I enjoy the essays of Dafoe, Addison, and Samuel
Johnson, all of which were published in pamphlets. Pamphlets were in vogue from 1650-1800, providing writers a forum to express views on politics, society, religion, and art. This has been revived in modern times in the form of blogs.

This is now a slight revamp of my blog that started in 2008.
My reading has become a little more specialized, although previous books commented on show I was heading this direction. At this point I will review mainly Christian texts or other texts from a Christian perspective. I intend to post more regularly with book reviews.

I consider reading and writing as part of the spiritual
journey toward maturity and, I hope, wisdom. These are postings of what I’m learning along the way.

Rod Zinkel, August 19, 2015


Sunday, November 28, 2010

The "Spiritual Poverty" of Modern Art

William Barrett writes of modern art that it stabs the "Philistine's sore spot, for the last thing he wants to be reminded of is his spiritual poverty" (Irreation Man 49). This is why so many Christians have little use for 'culture' of the past fifty years -- whether visual art, music, film, television -- not because it reminds them of their spiritual poverty, because they are not spiritually bankrupt, but culture is. If I am angered, as Barrett takes pride in prompting, it's because I may have paid for this art by taxation. Pity, or sorrow, is the more dominant feeling, for the artist is bankrupt. Christians still have the value for art that Horace and Sir Philip Sidney espoused: that it should delight and instruct. When both of these qualities are instilled or evoked, art reaches its zenith, and we are edified. It seems so much modern art has little to teach, other than to deconstruct what was once established, and there's little delight in disillusionment. The anger Barrett relishes is no longer in the audience, it's in the artist. The artist's message does not stab my sore spot; but I wonder why he is so proud to display his wounds.

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See the latest on Sheepshead Review, UWGB's Journal of the Arts:

www.uwgb.edu/sheepshead


Chapbook: Two Natures

The Neville Museum series has published a chapbook of 15 of my poems. They are of human and spiritual natures. Here are two poems from the book:

Two Natures

On still water of the pond
two natures you may notice--
where scum has been gathering,
there also grows the lotus.

One Way

There's a boy
who stands knee-high
to a July cornstalk.
He stares one way
down the dirt road
his mother has gone.
He find Fortune
has desrted him,
like the poverty-stricken,
society-forbidden parent.
"I can't take care of you," she said.
I am the child who mirrors
his mother's tears without knowing why?