intersections

When What is True is Not Pure

This is the video of the talk I gave at this year's Adventist Forum Conference. My title was "When What is True is Not Pure.

A Year of Daily Illustrations

Elysabeth Nikolic Bell (my talented wife) has started a new blog where she is posting her recent paintings and illustrations. I've known Elysabeth for 15 years to be an outstanding artist. These collections are a new turn for her and I'm really excited to tell you about them.

Very soon you'll be able to purchase these paintings in various forms, so stay tuned, visit her blog often, and give her some love in the comments.

You can also follower her on Twitter (@babettebell) and find her on Facebook.

Moby: Pale Horses

One of my favorite artists releases a new music video! Enjoy!
Pale Horses, by Moby

In the News

The Pacific Union Recorder this month has a piece about our CREDO Art Show. If you get the print edition delivered to your home be sure to watch for it, or check it out online.

Read more about the CREDO Art Show here and here.

Celebrating Faith and the Arts

This past Saturday my church did something amazing! It is really impossible to translate into words. This is the opening few paragraphs of my reflections on the CREDO Art Show. To read the whole thing, click here.

On Saturday night, November 15, between 100 and 150 people visited the CREDO Art Show, held at the Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church. The CREDO Art show was an artistic exploration of The Apostles’ Creed and the culmination of nearly a year of thinking and planning and nearly three months of worship services and sermons.

The evening began at 7:00 pm when the doors to the church opened. Behind the scenes, a team of about a dozen people were scurrying to put the finishing touches on the main gallery. By 7:30 pm there were 70–80 people in the foyer of the church, eating refreshments that were also artfully created by another team of church members and friends. At 7:30 we gave a very brief introduction and opened the door to the main gallery. For the next two and a half hours people came and went, enjoying some incredible art and having conversation.

For years I have wanted to do a sermon series on The Apostles’ Creed, exploring the ancient statement of faith phrase by phrase. While many Christians repeat the creed weekly in worship it is quite foreign to most Seventh-day Adventists, so I felt it would be an ironically fresh and almost edgy way to approach the subject of “belief” and “beliefs.” Our congregation is also pretty action oriented. It’s unusual for us to spend several months talking about our beliefs, so I felt it would be a good change of pace.

Read the rest at the church website.

More from Moscow and St. Petersburg

Just outside Church of the Savior on the Spilled blood in front of one of St. Petersburg's many beautiful canals.

See more pictures of our trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg here.

It's Friday night here in Moscow and we have one more full day to go. Tomorrow I preach in the Moscow Central Church, which is just about to celebrate it's 100 year anniversary (CORRECTION: this church is already 103 years old). Imagine the history this congregation has seen in the past 100 years: the last years of the Czars, two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin, Stalin, Communism and the proscription of religion, Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika and the eventual dismantling of the Soviet Union.

For the past couple of days we've had time to tour around. On Wednesday night, after my teaching assignment was finished, we took a train overnight to St. Petersburg. Upon arriving on Thursday morning we immediately visited several important places. First, we went to the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood (which is not only one of those fantastical Russian cathedrals but has the most amazing mosaic covering the entire inside the church) and the Hermitage Museum (one of the greatest museums in the world where we saw some amazing Picasso and Matisse of the best Rembrandts, including my all-time favorite, The Return of the Prodigal. (My attempt at a photo of this painting at the right - and proof I really saw it. Click the link to see a much better picture). It drizzled all day long so we got pretty wet and tired, but it was so completely worth it.

Today, back in Moscow again, we visited the The Armory inside the Kremlin, which is a museum dedicated to the treasures of Russian History. The collection includes the carriages of Elizabeth and Catherine, two Empresses of Russia, crowns and thrones, and priceless gifts given by other countries to Russia throughout it's long history.

We also we to the State Tretyakov Museum where, among other amazing pieces of art, I got to see the original icon of Andrei Rublev, The Trinity (1410). Many of you know I have a print of this icon hanging in my office. To see this first hand was a very moving experience for me.

It's been a remarkable experience. To see more of our pictures, please click here for our Flickr site. We'll be back in Los Angeles on Sunday night.

See all our pictures here!

WARNING: Adventist inside jokes below

A member of my church point out this amazing website selling T-shirts that poke fun at some unique characteristics of Adventism. Both the site and the T-shirts have an incredible design sense. I'm buying myself a couple of these! Check it out!

Eighteenfortyfour.com

Hotel Californian sign

I've been wanting to photograph these old signs for ages. Everytime I turn on Riverside Drive to take the I-5 South, I see them and comment to Elysabeth, "I've gotta come down here and shoot these signs." So, I finally did. There's a chain link fence around them which makes it impossible to get all the shots I wanted.

The lighting wasn't perfect. It was late afternoon, which I initially thought would be good, but because of the position of the signs relative to the sun, I think the early morning sun might be better. I'm going to try again.

I did a little research on where this hotel might have been. I found one Hotel Californian in Fresno and one in San Francisco. I wonder who these signs belong to. They seem to be on LA City land with a nice fence around them. Does the city own them? If so, why? Anyway, they're very cool. I love this era of signage. There are literally dozens of this type of sign on buildings in Hollywood. Hopefully I can shoot some of them too, one day. In fact, I have a little fantasy about the Hollywood Church. I'd love to replace our ugly sign on the freeway with one of these that stands up from the roof.

You can picture it can't you? Oh yea!

More pictures of the Hotel Californian signs here.

Amazingly beautiful photo blog

Blogs exists, mostly, in the domain of words. Even when we watch "vlogs" we are inevitably watching someone, well...talk. I find that my life is overwhelmed with words. I crave silence. But I also crave beauty. So, in the spirit of blogging beauty, allow me to refer to a blog that is just crammed with beautiful photography. It's The Boston Globe's, The Big Picture. The most recent post contains 16 amazing photographs of Jupiter.

(click to enlarge)

And, in honor of the Tour de France ending today in Paris, check out the amazing photos of the greatest sporting event in the world. (Congrats to Carlos Sastre, who won this year. I was really pulling for Cadel Evans - sorry to my Aussie mates. And to represent the US of A, I really like Christian Vande Velde, on a lot of levels, but I digress...).

(click to enlarge)

So, add The Big Picture to your feed reader and enjoy a little visual beauty in the midst of all these words.

(Thanks to Scott Arany for pointing me to this blog)

Glowing review of Chris Chinn's "On the Row"

Three months ago I wrote (here and here) about my friend, Chris Chinn, and an amazing solo exhibition of his portraits. He is one of the most talented people I know and, along with his wife, Mae, who is an architect, is a key part of the art community that is the Hollywood Adventist Church.

Well, just last week he told me that his show, "On the Row," was reviewed in the current issue of Artweek.

Chris posted the review on his website and you can read it here. Here's a short excerpt. It's really a very profound review. I think I'm going to ask him if I can put one of his pieces on layaway...for like, 10 years!

Portraits of individuals, when they do their main job, contain their stories, residual evidence of their lives.  In fulfilling the very highest historical function of portraiture, they also contain clues to the sitter’s economic status (usually elevated).  What Chinn has undertaken with this project thus has profound sociopolitical foundations as well as psychological subtext.  In paying attention to those to whom it is rarely paid, it is analogous to Gustave Courbet’s transgressive Stone Breakers (1849), considered brashly bohemian and inappropriate for lavishing that kind of technical finesse and dispassionate formal accomplishment on peasants doing manual labor.  And so it resonated as a political statement and sparked a realist movement.