How do creative writers, performers, and artists challenge us to think about religion, spirituality, and secular morality in new ways? What can imagination bring to our shared conversations? Categories of meaning move across personal, social, and political boundaries in ways that are difficult to capture and explain. How does creativity allow us to access this ambiguity?
In this third issue of the Elements Experiment “Contemplations, Creativities, and Conversations,” we are pleased to highlight the work of five contributors who each demonstrate how creativity can help us think through some of these questions and describe the indescribable. Thinking through the arts and about the arts provides space for diversity in how we understand our shared world. Creative works and works about creativity can also capture how categories of meaning move across conceptual boundaries. These works also demonstrate how cultural products are shaped by religious and spiritual imaginations and in turn how cultural products shape religion and spirituality. In this issue our contributors discover religion in the secular and the profane in religion, they trace the way spirituality is processed internally and expressed communally, and gesture toward the transformative power of various art forms such as music, poetry, and dance. The various works presented in this issue also constructively blur the boundaries between religion, the secular, the public, and the private and challenge where these boundaries begin and end.
The Elements Experiment seeks to challenge how we are permitted to speak about religion and secularity within our shared spaces. This issue demonstrates how creative works and artistic expressions produce valuable knowledge, knowledge that is difficult to access within conventional political and academic contexts. It is our hope that this issue of the Elements Experiment prompts you to reflect on how creativity modes of expression can contribute to our shared knowledge.
– Judith Ellen Brunton & Meaghan Weatherdon