Calvin G Seerveld

The value of these lectures lies in their call to a joyful task still unfinished. The kind of Christian culture involvement that Seerveld provokes and inspires remains an ongoing mandate: to entrust even our aesthetic lives to Christ. Seerveld's capricious and creative intellect expresses itself with an exuberant flair. His insights in these Christian Critiques are unapologetically Christian. He approaches art and literature from his experience in philosophy. One advantage of this perspective is that Seerveld avoids the pernicious idolizing of the arts endemic in much modern western culture, while he still asserts the inalienable value of artistic and literary behavior.

This book is a literary English translation of the Biblical book Ecclesiastes as a chorus of different voices (like the book of Job) contesting the meaning of things. A careful introduction delineates the various speakers--Qohelet, editor, apprentice rabbis, the Woman Wisdom (of Proverbs) voice--along with a sevenfold refrain, and reports on the various ways the whole piece has been performed in Canada, the USA and Spain. A very brief review of a few artworks by Goya, Rouault and Kollwitz hint at themes in Ecclesiastes. A thesis for the oral, performative nature of the Scriptures is articulated, along with a couple of pastoral expositions of the book.