Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I am currently reading/absorbed in a great book titled Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas. It is the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pastor and theologian who was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler during WWII. It has been really eye opening to get a bit more of German history involving the church and theology throughout the 1900s via Bonhoeffer's life and ministry. If you need a good read, I highly recommend this book.

I also thought of you all while reading a passage where Bonhoeffer speaks of his travels in Rome while he was 18. He enjoyed the arts and knew a fair amount of art history (I don't know where people back then found the time to do all this reading, letter writing and traveling....no facebook, cell phones, or internet???). I really like what he has to say about viewing and interpreting art work:

“However, it might be better for a layperson to be completely silent and to leave everything to the artists, because the current art historians really are the worst guides. Even the better ones are awful…There is no criterion for their interpretation and its correctness. Interpreting is generally one of the most difficult problems. Yet, our whole thinking process is regulated by it. We have to interpret and give meaning to things so that we can live and think. All of this is very difficult. When one doesn’t have to interpret, one should just leave it alone. One’s doesn’t need to know whether it is ‘Gothic’ pr ‘primitive,’ etc., persons who express themselves in their art. A work of art viewed with clear intellect and comprehension has its own effect on the unconscious. More interpretation won’t lead to a better understanding of the art. One either intuitively sees the right thing or one doesn’t. This is what I call an understanding of art. One should work diligently to try to understand the work while looking at it. After that one gets the absolutely certain feeling, ‘I have grasped the essence of this work.’ Intuitive certainty arises on the basis of some unknown procedure. To attempt to put this conclusion into words and thereby interpret the work is meaningless for anyone else. “