From the Editor

 

Throughout my career as a musician, booking agent, artist manager, Artist & Repertoire executive, marketing VP, educator, and author I have felt compelled to attempt to fashion, for lack of a better term, a “Rock and Roll Theological Aesthetic.” By that I do not mean a philosophy of religious art per se, but an exploration into how great art, even popular music, by its sheer originality and excellence, can transport the listener from the here-and-now to what seems another realm, another place, another way of being. To quote The Door’s Jim Morrison, I marvel at how compelling expressions of creativity can help us “break on through to the other side.” To that I would add the wisdom of Mssrs. Jagger and Richards, “I know it’s only Rock and Roll, but I like it.”

 

While prowling through a used bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, I came across the intriguingly-titled book, The Meaning of the Creative Act, by the Russian philosopher, Nicholas Berdyaev. Lots of big words—and even bigger ideas—but no book has more profoundly affected my understanding of the centrality of creativity to our personal and professional lives. It brought into critical and imminent focus the perennial questions of “what does it mean to be human,” “what does it mean to be an artist,” and “what does it mean to be a believer in the God enfleshed in the human person of Jesus.” And besides, what self-respecting Rock and Roller would not be attracted to a goateed, beret-wearing, cigar-chomping autodidact with a history of not only being kicked out of school, but twice being banished from his home country for his radical ideas about freedom, creativity and what it means to be human.

 

For your consideration as "Patron Saint of the New Spiritual Humanism," may I suggest Nicholas Berdyaev.