Episode 65: Poet Malcolm Guite

Poet Malcolm Guite, on how God comes to us through the arts:"When God comes to us fully and richly as a person, and in and through the lives of other people, it's almost like we're scared, like God's got too close, so we abstract him again. We turn God into a bunch of propositions and put him back up into some intellectual realm. He's always getting past that and coming back to us. One of the ways I think, in our age, that God does that is through the arts. Because I think our age is so emphasized on analysis and reason and breaking things down into constituent parts, that people are in some sense rebelling against that. They need something with soul, but a lot of people instead of seeing the heart and soul of that as in the gift of the revelation of the gospel, are finding it through the arts instead."Listen to George and Malcolm Guite talk about the art of poetry and how it cultivates the spiritual imagination. Lots of wonderful is poetry is quoted here, and referenced in the comments below, by Seamus Heaney, Edwin Muir, John Donne, and Malcolm Guite himself.