Book: Religion and Sight
Chapter: 10. A Hand Outstretched in Darkness: Evangelical Encounters with Art
Based on the author's ethnographic work, the essay focuses on the destabilizing effect that visual art may have on the metaphorical wall that conservative evangelical communities construct between themselves and the outside world, in large part to keep non-evangelical influences out of sight. The essay explores what it is like to view non-evangelical art through the wall from the evangelical side; in what ways the arts created sight lines over and through the wall; how the arts worked to tear down the wall.