What We're About

There is a space where making meaning and finding meaning intertwine and overlap; a space where religion is queered and queried by intuition, where art is leavened by community, commitment, and an awareness that all things are bound in kinship. It is a space where the shared materials of the arts and religion are sifted and sculpted and cast into bricks, formed into vessels and shelters, woven into garments and spun into stories and songs. What comes out of this labor, the artifacts and experiences and ideas that emerge from this hybrid space is what we call Theopoetics.

ARC was founded to identify, articulate, and explore these experiences and artifacts and ideas, to map, however provisionally, this evolving, fertile, dynamic district of intellectual and creative inquiry.

Chartered in late 1961 under the care of Protestant Existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, along with Alfred Barr jr., founding curator of the Museum of Modern Art, and Harvard Theologian Marvin Halverson, the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture first began the project of charting the modern contours of the territory that lies between art and religion. It has weathered Cold Wars and Culture Wars; it has plied the churn of market-centered media culture in the atomic age, reclaiming depth and wholeness in the face of dehumanizing systems of power and commerce and thought.

Like it was for so many of us, 2020 was a hinge of a year for ARC. Our emerging model of national gatherings, focused on intense and interpersonal exploration of the field, was dismantled by the COVID-19 pandemic. But to be fair, the writing was already on the wall. COVID was really just the capstone. Climate change and increasing disparities in economic access to industrial travel were upending our template of intimate gatherings from across the country and beyond.

We look with gratification, though, as we note a field that was essentially founded with the emergence of ARC, now teeming with a diverse and active population of individuals, events, academic programs, websites, exhibitions and performances that explore and expand this trans-disciplinary space. And we have been buoyed by the enduring support we have received from our community. We are so grateful for your support through our many iterations.

ARC is, and always will be, a collaborative community for those who cultivate embodied and just ways of knowing and being through creative and spiritual practices. We envision a just world where creativity and spirituality work together to promote the flourishing of all creation.