Church wants more Christ-centered artwork in buildings

[Palerider]

This is such a joke. A day late and a dollar short as they say.

I remember ten years ago when they redecorated our stake building. The 1st Pres. and Joseph Smith took preeminence everywhere. There were some prints of Christ but in the High Council room in particular, the Savior was relegated to a meager spot that was covered when the doors were opened. Again, Joseph and the 1st Pres. took the prime spots with Joseph elevated higher than any other.

This change should have been done a hundred years ago. I guess the wheels of "revelation" turn exceedingly slowly. Actually they are disgustingly slow.

https://www.ldsliving.com/First-Preside ... es/s/92831

[lostinmiddlemormonism]

...yes, this right after Nelson's amazing Joseph Smith orgasm in April.

[Mackman]

It's all BullShit !!! They can't ditch Joseph Smith and the current 1st presidency they would endanger their Cult status !!!!!! They are bunch of liars they just want everyone to think they believe in Christ in reality they believe in the gospel of Joseph Smith !!!

[alas]

When “art” is so over done as to become cliche it loses all meaning. I have seen their selection of 22 paintings so many times that they are just meaningless. Boring boring boring. Might as well be a white wall or patterned wall paper. The people who made this decision need to write “trite” on the chalk board 10,000 times, until they get it. Kinda like my reaction to seeing the Mona Lisa in person at the Louvre in Paris. Eh. But some of the other paintings I have never seen 2,000 copies of, WOW. I bought a print on canvas of George de la Tour’s painting of Saint Joseph charpentier. It has Joseph doing some carpentry while Jesus holds a candle. And it glowed. So beautiful. Probably the most beautiful thing I saw in Paris. Some of the other paintings I loved were so obscure I couldn’t even buy a post card of them. But we bought enough postcards to make playing the board game Masterpiece more interesting. There is SO much beautiful artwork to choose from, why not appreciate the variety, the beauty of something not so trite and over used as to be worthless?

Besides, all of their selected paintings have the same problem. Jesus looks like a Norwegian, or Swede, not a middle Eastern Jew. It is actually racist to always portray him that way. He was Not white, but probably brown. If you look at the painting of the sermon on the mount, the other men look like they could be from the Middle East, but Jesus once again is probably from Sweden. The artist took the effort to portray most of the people as they should look, then did the racist thing on Jesus. And that one with him holding a black child? A blue eyed Jesus? please. Let’s be historically accurate enough to give him brown eyes, even if we insist on Caucasian features and skin tone. Jesus more likely looked like the black child than a Norwegian, after all, Egypt wasn’t as far away as Norway is.

[moksha]

I applaud the effort to make the LDS Church more Christian. All that peculiarity brought on by secrecy over illegal practices (no, I am not including nude clogging in the Temple) and general overboard reverence of things made up did not enhance the Church.

Looking at depictions of a Norwegian Jesus is bound to have a positive effect (at least according to those folks into Neuro-linguistic programming). If we are what we iconize, then this will be much better than the portraits of the past.

Even the name change separates us from those "Mormons" who would hate on homosexuals and polygamize at the drop of a hat.

What is next that can be improved? Deemphasize business attire as being holy. I mean, Jesus wore a toga (jeans and T-shirt), while Trump representing Satan's minions wears a business suit. This one might be difficult, but a prophet could pull it off.

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/05 ... s-leaders/

[MoPag]

Ummm... is Rusty gonna get any revelation on the early 90's floral pattern couches? I mean I guess if we wait long enough it will become vintage and trendy?

[Hagoth]

"This effort supports President Russell M. Nelson’s call over the past 18 months to emphasize that “Jesus Christ is at the center of His Church.”

If you keep saying it over and over then I guess it becomes true. Like saying the virus will just go away in April.

When I went to the Draper Temple open house it was almost embarrassing how hard they were trying to advertise their Christianity. They hung pictures of Jesus everywhere (that are not there today). I guess they only had a couple of approved paintings, because you kept seeing the same ones over and over, so it kinda came across as propagandistic.

You would see this painting in one room, and then turn the corner and see it again in the next room:

[Just This Guy]

Hey, those royalty payments are not going to make themselves...

[RubinHighlander]

Graven Images

But don't bother making the Jesus pics historically/biologically accurate, be sure to keep them all white European oriented.

If the second coming is just around the corner, does that mean that Jebus loved the dinosaurs more than us accountable hominids? I mean, they will have lived much longer on the planet than us, before most of them pissed him off and the asteroid was allowed to wipe them out. Not too mention how long trilobites got to swim around and evolve all those millions of years.

[Hagoth]

A TBM friend of mine became a devoted fan of the FARMS/FAIR apologetics and he confessed to me that his biggest hurdle was accepting that the only way to make that work was to accept that the Nephites were middle-easterners who mixed in with Mesoamericans, which means that there was no possible way that the could have been white people. I suppose a non-Caucasian Jesus may be an even bigger gap to jump.

I'd love to see more Jesus along these lines:

[2bizE]

I think this is a good thing. Anything to knock Joseph down below Christ is good. It mentioned in a SLTrib article that the foyers are also to be free of cork boards, missionary plaques, and I assume easels announcing Relief Society super Saturday’s. Only Christ can be in the central foyers. Sure, it will be the pleasant looking white Jesus we are accustomed to, but Jesus nonetheless. Many of us won’t see the changes anyway...

[Palerider]

From a purely Christian point of view it's hard to tell what the Savior would have looked like. He said, "If ye have seen me, ye have seen the Father."

I have no idea what ethnicity, if any, might be attached to the Father. He could just as easily be Middle Eastern as Caucasian.

But because of the bias of old white guys in the 1800-1900 hundreds, they assume because the Caucasian race is "advanced" beyond all others, then obviously, God must look like us. And that bias continues among church leadership today. They feel comfortable thinking that Christ looks like them. Except for the beard and somewhat longer hair.

I imagine it to be extremely difficult to attempt to depict Christ. Sometimes I wonder if we even should make that attempt. I'd it creating an "image" in the Biblical sense?

Maybe the answer lies in whether we worship the image itself?

[MoPag]

Dear Rusty,

You can put Jesus' name and face all over your church. Hell, get a Jesus tattoo-on your forehead. But if you and your buddies are going to continue to harm and marginalize women, people of color, members of the LGBT+ community, single people, blended families, (I could go on and on) You are missing the point. You have no idea what Jesus taught, what he stood for and what he died for. You are using his name and his image in vain. You sit your wrinkly, white a$$ on literally billions of dollars, hold up a picture of white Jesus and ask starving families to give you more money. I hope you get to meet Jesus one day and I hope he goes "money changer" on your a$$.

Love,
A f*cking Pagan who knows Jesus better than you.

[Red Ryder]

Hmmm....

Too bad there wasn’t a universal symbol of Christianity that Mormons could just follow everyone else and latch onto.

This could do:

[Reuben]

I imagine it to be extremely difficult to attempt to depict Christ. Sometimes I wonder if we even should make that attempt. I'd it creating an "image" in the Biblical sense?

Maybe the answer lies in whether we worship the image itself?

I think it's very easy to imagine depicting him, but very hard to carry out. Jesus always looks like the people you impoverish and oppress. He looks like the people who scare and disgust you. He looks like the Other.

[Reuben]

If the second coming is just around the corner, does that mean that Jebus loved the dinosaurs more than us accountable hominids? I mean, they will have lived much longer on the planet than us, before most of them pissed him off and the asteroid was allowed to wipe them out. Not too mention how long trilobites got to swim around and evolve all those millions of years.

This is literally my favorite Jesus picture. I love the murderous look in the dinosaur's eye.

[Hagoth]

Mopag and Reuben:

[StarbucksMom]

Dear Rusty,

You can put Jesus' name and face all over your church. Hell, get a Jesus tattoo-on your forehead. But if you and your buddies are going to continue to harm and marginalize women, people of color, members of the LGBT+ community, single people, blended families, (I could go on and on) You are missing the point. You have no idea what Jesus taught, what he stood for and what he died for. You are using his name and his image in vain. You sit your wrinkly, white a$$ on literally billions of dollars, hold up a picture of white Jesus and ask starving families to give you more money. I hope you get to meet Jesus one day and I hope he goes "money changer" on your a$$.

Love,
A f*cking Pagan who knows Jesus better than you.

Epic. Can someone post this on Russ’ front door?

[John Hamer]

In our congregation, we wanted to have images from the Christian tradition, while avoiding the literalistic / Romantic era of Anglo-Saxon Jesus paintings. We opted to reproduce the stained glass windows from Chartres Cathedral (one of the standout examples of Medieval Christian art and architecture) to represent Christ and the Christian tradition.

You can see all our artwork in this video. The Chartres windows are at 8:40.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90NNxQcAfY

[Hagoth]

Wow John, I love the way you have designed your space. You have eliminated pretty much everything that puts knots in my stomach when I enter a traditional church and replaced it with things that make it feel inviting. Genius.