We believe that beauty, art and creativity should be valued, used, and understood as coming from or being connected to the Creator.

Evangelicalism has successfully extinguished any artistic impulse. Not only has it failed to produce anything that rewards serious aesthetic reflection, it has erased any memory of what the religious imagination once did for the pious.

Emergents say they feel this loss very keenly, and one of the things they hoped to do was "bring Art back into the Church".

And how's that working out for them, you ask? Other than the transcendent works of Soupiset, Scandrette and McLaren, what sort of splash has Emergence made in the art world?

"Well," I reply, "there are always the wood-roasted salsas, the urban tribal T-shirts, the mittens and the totebags of Solomon's Porch, Doug Pagitt's suburban flea market of inspirational bric-a-brac."

I'd hoped to make it up for the Minneapolis show to visit with all my art critic friends from New York and Boston, but Remonstrans' travel budget took a big hit after the Christianity21 fiasco and the Dallas book signing. In addition, the editorial board failed to see any connection between art and, as they refer to them, "those disgusting postmodern rodents". Our Fine Arts editor, Ms. Prudence McSpigot, suggested in a piercing soliloquy that I stop annoying her. She said that she could not even imagine under what loathsome circumstances she would need to talk with me, but should that contingency ever arise she would give self-disembowelment a try. She said I should content myself with Doug's little 12-second docudramas here.

I pass them along for your edification and inspiration.

The molested spirits of Chagall, Masaccio, Dürer and Giorgione now shriek, wail and sob through the streets of Minneapolis.