Quotes from Jeremy Begbie

This is music that will disturb your imagination and delight your heart-a rare combination.

The bona fide artist must be governed as little as possible by law-governed nature, the material encountered. This can lead to attempts to escape, or direct attention away from, all things concrete and finite, but much commoner in modernity has been a conception of the artist as one who masters and controls, bends the material to predetermined purposes.

The root problem with the bloated image of the artist that haunts modernity, I suggest, is not the way the artist is being pictured but the model of divine transcendence that feeds it (and which in turn is fed by it). What kind of deity lurks there?

The artist, that is to say, begins by looking to the world around him, and then, on the basis of his powers of observation, offers some perceptual account of it for our appreciation.

In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.

To be new or original, after all, is proof that we are alive and have agency, that we are not enmeshed in an inexorable chain of cause and effect.

Only God truly creates, for only God is unconstrained by things external to himself.

Music has its own distinctive contribution to make to theology precisely because it is a distinctive human practice.

Art reminds us that in fact the world always exceeds our grasp and perception.

For all its interconnectedness, music is marked by a unique and irreducible integrity, its own way of working.

Could not the art of dance, at its best, be read as gesturing toward the resurrection of the body celebrated in 1 Corinthians 15, a fully physical body certainly, but a body whose life vastly surpasses that of the body of this life ... the body riven by sin and running toward death?

One of the primary services the arts can render to theology is their integrative power, their ability to interrelate the intellect with the other facets of our human makeup.