"The potential influence of artists on contemporary approaches to religion and spirituality is immense. Although artists seldom command regular audiences the way clergy do, their work is widely distributed through the mass media and in galleries, museums, bookstores, and retreat centers. People look to artists for inspiration because they seem to have expressed something of everybody's person struggles or simply because they articulate fresh, surprising, even shocking views.

"But the main reason for the current interest in artists' spirituality is that American culture itself is deeply unsettled. While a sizable minority of the public continues to participate regularly in weekend religious services, most Americans believe it important to make up their own minds about spirituality. They may hold the clergy in high regard but feel it is equally important to absorb the wisdom of poets and musicians....Artists provide models of how to say something about one's experiences of the sacred when rational discourse comes up short.

"Artists' life stories...sometimes reveal an intense spiritual journey behind a work of art. Their narratives are full of sadness as well as joy, failure as well as success, questions as well as answers. They show the importance of reflecting on the brokenness of life in order to find coherence."

(Quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/9/01)

Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow,
Creative Spirituality: The Way of the Artist (University of California Press, 2001)