Q: It seems that a big part of your personal perspective on these questions, which based on what you have just said informs Image a lot as well, is the concept of Christian Humanism. In Beauty will Save the World, you talk at length about Christian Humanism and how it relates to cultural production. Can you explain what Christian Humanism is and how that informs the vision of redeeming culture through creation?

A: Absolutely. People have told me from Day One that I was an idiot to invoke the term “humanism” at all, because in the last 30 to 40 years, the word “humanism” has primarily only been modified by one other word, and that’s “secular,” which I found to be a travesty for a number of reasons. Humanism is ultimately the same word and concept as the humanities, the very core of the traditional liberal arts education as it evolved out of a kind of classical Christian synthesis in our cultural history. Humanism, in my view, is a way of looking at the world that cares deeply about how human beings are made.

I began to feel that I had a kinship with thinkers from other eras that were struggling with this same issue of a religion that had become overly politicized and rationalized, and who saw the imagination and the beautiful as attempts at balance and fullness so that faith can be more real for human beings and more deeply grounded in their lives and experiences. In particular, I found that the Renaissance thinkers who sought to synthesize the best of classical culture with the best of Christian theology really felt like blood brothers to me. My heroes are people like Erasmus and Thomas More, who understood the dangers of an excessively dry and legalistic faith. They fought a rather third rate scholasticism of their time. They felt that literature—and at their time that meant quintessentially classical Pagan literature—was important because it grounded the big ideas in human experience. It actually tested them out in people’s lives and made them tangible.

Any religious discourse that drifted from human experience was liable to get into trouble. I felt a great kinship and subsequently discovered that the myth that I grew up with, the myth that the Renaissance was an explosion of prideful, human-centered secularity against the pious beauty of the Middle Ages, was in fact just that, a myth that’s been debunked by one of the most important historiographical efforts of the last hundred years. So the humanists was the humanities, was the role of literature and philosophy and language and history, the concrete, and beliefs that it’s important to think honestly about the lives of people. We’re not just brains; the heart and the head are integrated in the humanist view, and that to me is really important.

Q: One of the things I was struck by in Beauty is your frustration with blanket condemnations of modern art. You came to this by way of T.S. Eliot, who you mention used a modernist style in a way you found compelling. How did your transition to appreciating contemporary art happen, and where are some places you see good work being done in art today?

A: I originally loved Eliot because I thought Eliot was a political opponent of my political opponents. When I read beyond his essays to his poetry, I began to what have what they call a cognitive dissonance. I began to have a kind of tickle at the back of my brain which said, wait a minute, this man is working in and through the very art forms that I supposedly was dead set against. The steam started coming out of my ears like the robot who says, “I cannot compute.”

And then in very short order I had a similar experience with Flannery O’Connor, who uses violence and the grotesque. I had Eliot using fragmentation and allusion, and O’Connor using violence and the grotesque, and none the less they were deeply traditional people. It finally dawned on me that the nature of artistic change is stylistic change. You don’t have to equate stylistic change with content or conviction. But in fact, change is precisely the way that as a culture we try to keep alive that which has become too calcified or rote in a certain kind of language that has been overdone. Cultural aesthetic change is not only consonant with conserving the ancient, but in fact necessary to it.

So when we started Image, we decided we would look for the new Eliots and O’Connors. We actually didn’t know how much we would find. We were half-convinced by the narrative of decline, that it was all downhill, and we didn’t know what to expect. But one of the miracles of life is that sometimes when you seek, you find. And we found artists who were interested in this, and we found people coming out of the woodwork.

We were one of many who were questioning these separations that people thought were eternal. We just dared to question and dared to look, and we found a lot of work that’s out there. We don’t expect everybody to like every single thing we’ve published, but I think what we’ve demonstrated is that deeply religious questions can be embodied in almost every imaginable art form and style that exists over the world, and that faith doesn’t reduce itself to some little clique or single eccentric mannerism, but that it’s capable and stimulating of every possible form of human imagination.