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I am certain that I met Deborah Sokolove when she became Artist-in-Residence and Curator of the Dadian Gallery at Wesley Theological Seminary in 1994, but she didn’t fully register on my radar screen until she registered for my course. The course was The Hebrew Bible and the Arts. I believe this was the third time I had taught the course.

Now, I had been Professor of Hebrew Bible at Wesley for twenty-three years at that point, and this was not a course I imagined teaching when I first finished my graduate work. But I happened to come to Wesley in time for the beginning of an unusual romance between theological education and the arts. Due to the persistence and vision of an artist named Catherine Kapikian, a program bringing the arts into the life of a theological school had been founded and was flourishing by the early 1990s at Wesley. One aspect of that program, encouraged by a Luce Foundation grant, was to integrate the arts into the full curriculum of theological education. Wesley had quality courses in the arts, but this was an effort to use the arts as a resource in many other disciplines of theological education, and I was an enthusiastic participant in this enterprise.

Except for some early education and participation in theater arts and a lifetime of singing regularly with groups, I had no formal training in the arts. I knew, however, as a Bible teacher that artists of every artistic medium had been interacting with biblical stories and texts in a serious way for centuries. Many people have been as influenced by artistic interactions with the Bible as they have by sermons or formal Bible study. I wanted my students as future pastors and church leaders to know something about that, and to draw on the arts as a resource in their ministries. I began to use the arts in my introductory Hebrew Bible classes, and students responded to this, so I thought a course focused entirely on the interaction of the Hebrew Bible and the arts would be a good idea. I designed the course syllabus to provide interaction with artists’ biblical encounters in all the arts: visual arts, music, drama, film, literature, poetry. (I couldn’t get dance in there although some student projects did.) I taught the course a couple of times and felt pretty good about it.

Then, in 1994, a program of our Center for the Arts and Religion to bring practicing artists to campus, to work in our studio and interact with our entire community, brought Deborah Sokolove to campus and into my class. Deborah is a trained and accomplished artist. She has degrees in art education and in computer graphics. She is a painter and a sculptor as well as a computer graphic artist and designer. But she is also from a Jewish background but had become a leader in an unusual congregation called Seekers Church, affiliated with Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. It was wonderful to have her in the class. She made wise and insightful contributions to class discussions. The sharing of her own class project was a highlight for everyone. We often interacted on Wesley’s campus and in the Dadian Gallery where she began to curate outstanding shows.

At the end of the course she came to my office to thank me for the course and tell me how much she enjoyed it. But the rest of our conversation I can really translate in only one way. In the gentle but persistent style she naturally uses she said “It’s really too bad you don’t know more about art.”

Well, I actually agreed with this. So when she completed her Master of Theological Studies degree at Wesley in 1998 I invited her to begin team teaching the course on The Hebrew Bible and the Arts with me. We did so through several offerings of the course until I retired in 2009. I had become the dean at Wesley so I actually hired her to do this, and it was my joy that in my final year as dean before retirement I hired her as the second Director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary.

In the years we taught together I did become Deborah’s student in many ways as we created in our teaching team the very dialog between Hebrew Scripture and the arts that we were examining in the work of artists in every medium. Many times during those years I can remember saying to Deborah (as friend, colleague, and dean) that I hoped she was going to find a way to publish and share the insights she gave to us in class. Now she has given us a volume that does this, and in a wonderfully readable way.

Before I turn you loose to sample the treasures of these pages I do want to say something further about the author and then something about the volume.

Deborah Sokolove doesn’t seem capable of doing anything halfway. She was already a trained and successful artist when I first met her, but she was restless. She found at Wesley a context that valued the intersection of arts and theology. But neither of these were just disciplinary subjects to her. Deborah is a deeply passionate artist and a deeply spiritual person of faith. In her congregation she is one of the leaders and has used her artistic talents to great effect in the life of that community. At Wesley she could relate art and theology together in a community that valued the deep way she sought to do that. She had even completed an MTS degree and begun to do some teaching but she didn’t want to be considered an artist teaching about connections to theology and church. She wanted to be an artist and a theologian and therefore able to speak from the inside of both of these disciplinary worlds. She became a doctoral student in liturgical studies at Drew University and commuted from Wesley to Madison, NJ to complete the work for this degree. There are few in the world of theological education who have prepared themselves so thoroughly to invite, as her volume subtitle does, Conversation Between Artists, Theologians, and the Church. She invites each group as one of their own. Few volumes available in the field achieve this intimacy of invitation into conversation. She knows and anticipates the hesitancies, the stumbling blocks, the misperceptions, and the blind spots from each side of the dialogue because to some degree she inhabits both sides of the conversation.

Over the years I have read many volumes on the relationship of art to theology. The questions get shaped and reshaped, but you can almost always tell which side of the dialogue the author inhabits. The reviews then are predictable. Valuable insights but the author doesn’t fully understand my world (depending on whether the reviewer is an artist or a theologian). That will not be possible with Deborah Sokolove’s volume.

Sanctifying Art is a volume with gifts on many levels. It is written in a readable and accessible style and addresses issues in a way that will find audiences among theologians, artists, church people, and students alike. This is a rare quality and it does this with the intention that these communities might fruitfully find things to talk about together. She punctures pretensions, misconceptions, and narrowed vision that exist on both sides of the dialogue. She tackles deep philosophical issues long debated by both artists and theologians, like truth and beauty, and leaves the reader feeling like these debates have become fresh and worth pondering once again.

I cannot remember finding in any volume on art and religion a chapter that is the parallel of Deborah Sokolove’s chapter on “Art and the Need of the World.” She told me in a recent conversation that it was the hardest chapter to write, and I can believe that. It is filled with the passion of a woman who believes that both art and religion have failed in their purpose if their endeavors cannot positively effect the needs of the world. That introverted art or religion are not worthy of the calling they profess. This chapter alone is worth the price of this book.

But I am not writing a review. This is merely a foreword. It is a word that comes before from someone privileged to journey alongside a remarkable woman named Deborah Sokolove. She became my friend even while she became a trusted colleague and a valued teacher. We had adventures together in our teaching, and she even shares some of this in the volume. Having taken my own journey with her, and having read this volume now, I can tell you that you have a great journey ahead of you as you read on past this foreword.

Bruce C. Birch

Wesley Theological Seminary

Fall 2012