Timothy Keller mines the career and creative process of J.R.R. Tolkien for how he came to have such an enduring cultural impact. And, perhaps, how we can do the same.

Timothy was born and raised in Pennsylvania and educated at Bucknell University, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary. His first pastorate was in Hopewell, Virginia. In 1989 he started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City with his wife, Kathy, and their three sons. Today, Redeemer has nearly six thousand regular Sunday attendees and has helped to start more than three hundred new churches around the world. He is the author of The Songs of Jesus, Prayer, Encounters with Jesus, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, and Every Good Endeavor, among others, including the perennial bestsellers The Reason for God and The Prodigal God.

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Imagine art that is risky, complex, and subtle. Imagine music, movies, books, and paintings of the highest quality. Imagine art that permeates society, challenging conventional thinking and standard morals to their core. Imagine that it is all created by Christians! This is the bold vision of Steve Turner, who has worked among a wide variety of artists for decades. He believes Christians should confront society and the church using art’s powerful impact. Art can faithfully chronicle the lives of ordinary people and express the transcendence of God. And Christians should be involved in every level of the art world and in every medium. In this revised and expanded edition of a contemporary classic, Turner builds a compelling case for Christians in the arts. If Jesus is Lord of all of life and creation, then art is part of his cultural mandate. It can and should be a way of expressing faith through creatively, beautifully, and truthfully arranged words, sounds, and sights.

Steve is an English music journalist, biographer, and poet, who has spent his career chronicling and interviewing people from the worlds of music, film, television, fashion, art, and literature. His articles have appeared in Rolling Stone, Mojo, Q, and the London Times.

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Leadership Is an Art has long been a must-read not only within the business community but also in professions ranging from academia to medical practices, to the political arena. De Pree looks at leadership as a kind of stewardship, stressing the importance of building relationships, initiating ideas, and creating a lasting value system within an organization. Rather than focusing on the “hows” of corporate life, he explains the “whys.” He shows that the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality and the last is to say thank you.

Perhaps most well-known as CEO of Herman Miller, Inc., trustee of Fuller Theological Seminary, and author of multiple leadership books, Max De Pree’s leadership was an art, 1924-2017.

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Image was founded in 1989 to demonstrate the continued vitality and diversity of contemporary art and literature that engage with the religious traditions of Western culture. Now one of the leading literary journals published in English, it is read all over the world—and forms the nexus of a warm and active community.

“We believe that the great art that has emerged from these faith traditions is dramatic, not didactic—incarnational, not abstract. And so our focus has been on works of imagination that embody a spiritual struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel. In our pages the larger questions of existence intersect with what the poet Albert Goldbarth calls the “greasy doorknobs and salty tearducts” of our everyday lives.”

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The Christian Imagination brings together in a single source the best that has been written about the relationship between literature, the arts, and the Christian faith. The anthology includes essays and excerpts from over thirty authors, including T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, and Francis Schaeffer.

Leland Ryken edited another book with this same title but different content in 2002.

Leland is Professor of English at Wheaton College. He has authored or edited such books as The Word of God in English, The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, and The Complete Literary Guide to the Bible. He was the literary stylist for the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible, published by Crossway Bibles in 2001, and the literary content contributor to the ESV Study Bible, released in 2008.

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In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with “one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person.” For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls “the hard things — rock mountain and salt sea,” she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.

Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of twelve books, including For the Time Being, Teaching a Stone to Talk, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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The Bible offers a robust affirmation of the arts. The human impulse to create reflects our being created in the image of a creator God. Art and the Bible has been a foundational work for generations of Christians in the arts. In this book’s classic essays, Francis Schaeffer first examines the scriptural record of the use of various art forms, and then establishes a Christian perspective on art. With clarity and vigor, Schaeffer explains why “the Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.”

Recognized internationally for his work in Christianity and culture, Francis A. Schaeffer authored more than twenty books, which have been translated into a score of languages and sold millions worldwide. He and his wife, Edith, founded L’Abri Fellowship international study and discipleship centers.

Art and the Bible is available every Sunday at our book tent. It can also be purchased online:

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In this classic book, Madeleine L’Engle addresses the questions, “What does it mean to be a Christian artist?” and “What is the relationship between faith and art?” Through L’Engle’s beautiful and insightful book, readers will find themselves called to what the author views as the prime tasks of an artist: to listen, to remain aware, and to respond to creation through one’s own art.

Madeleine L’Engle was the author of more than forty-five books for all ages, among them the beloved A Wrinkle in Time, awarded the Newbery Medal; A Ring of Endless Light, a Newbery Honor Book; A Swiftly Tilting Planet, winner of the American Book Award; and the Austin family series of which Troubling a Star is the fifth book. L’Engle was named the 1998 recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards award, honoring her lifetime contribution in writing for teens.

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From a passionate and talented chef who also happens to be an Episcopalian priest comes this surprising and thought-provoking treatise on everything from prayer to poetry to puff pastry. In The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Farrar Capon talks about festal and ferial cooking, emerging as an inspirational voice extolling the benefits and wonders of old-fashioned home cooking in a world of fast food and prepackaged cuisine.

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When she died in 1964, Flannery O’Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her lifetime. The brilliant pieces in Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O’Connor’s lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the boldness and simplicity of her style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith.

Flannery O’Connor was one of America’s most gifted writers. She wrote two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and two story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. Her Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year, and in a 2009 online poll it was voted as the best book to have won the award in the contest’s 60-year history. Her letters were published in The Habit of Being.

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Tree and Leaf contains On Fairy-stories — J.R.R. Tolkien’s most famous and most important essay, which defined his conception of fantasy as a literary form and its relation to faith and myth — and Leaf by Niggle — a poignant and haunting story about an artist on a curious journey often seen as an allegory of the writer’s own process and life.

Tolkien, beloved throughout the world as the creator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a fellow of Pembroke College, and a fellow of Merton College until his retirement in 1959. His chief interest was the linguistic aspects of the early English written tradition, but even as he studied these classics he was creating a set of his own.

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