Luminous: Conversations On Sacred Arts
Episodes
Philip E. Baker: The Life of an Organist
27 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Reflecting on a life well lived, and on music beautifully played, celebrated organ master Phil Baker contributes profound observations on music and th...
Ralph Sidway: Evoking Stillness
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A master photographer, Ralph Sidway also thinks and speaks articulately about the art of photography, and the beauty of putting the camera aside and s...
Bruce Herman / Makoto Fujimura: 1+1=1
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The symbiotic chemistry of two visionary artists is both creative and personal. This comes across palpably in our three-way conversation—a particula...
George Kordis: The Journey of a Master Iconographer
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
George Kordis is a world-renowned iconographer. His work can be found in churches, museums, and sacred spaces throughout the world. He's also a t...
Helena Tulve: Channeling Creation
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s rare that one encounters a soul so vastly creative, and so clearly attuned to the things-that-are. Helena Tulve’s diverse compositional oeuvr...
Kim Haines-Eitzen: Desert Sounds, Desert Silence
12 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
 Kim Haines-Eitzen adds to a rich body of work with her most recent book, an exploration of the desert soundscapes that may have shaped the lives and...
George Kordis: Art in Church and Secular Culture
23 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In his art and in his thought, George Kordis articulates his ideas with breathtaking clarity. And he is one of the world’s great living iconographer...
Mona Arshi: Poetry and Defamiliarization
21 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mona Arshi brings all of herself to her poetry: her background as a human rights lawyer, a family lineage deeply embedded in the poetic, and a keen ob...
Aidan Hart: Creation is a Poem of Love
22 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
 Aidan Hart works in multiple media—painting, sculpture, carving, mosaics—to create liturgical art of stunning beauty. As an author and speaker, ...
A Tribute to Ivan Moody
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This special episode of Luminous is a tribute to Fr Ivan Moody—composer, scholar, musicologist, conductor, who impacted so many people and constitue...
Vesper Stamper: Into Sharp Relief
04 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
 Vesper Stamper writes books for some of the most discerning and important audiences: young adults. And others, but it’s this audience that informs...
Nicholas Samaras: Attentiveness and the Sacred
08 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This conversation with award-winning poet Nicholas Samaras is a reminder of what life can be like when we listen, pay attention, and hear the musical ...
STUDYING THE SACRED ARTS
25 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On this special episode of Luminous, our host talks with two students in the MA Program at the Institute of Sacred Arts. This is an opportunity to mee...
Jennifer Awes Freeman: Gleaning the Message of the Arts
27 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Apart from our enjoying the arts, even being spiritually uplifted by them, the sacred arts are carrying a message, even a “teaching” that we can a...
Alexander Lingas: Cosmic Music
30 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
 One of the leading lights of sacred choral music in the world today, Alexander Lingas has so much to offer in a conversation about music from many t...
Timothy Patitsas: Beauty Heals
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
 "What does Tim Patitsas mean by his refrain of “beauty first?” That’s one question that made me want to talk with him. We go there. And m...
Fr Maximos Constas: Revelation as Concealment
16 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Fr Maximos is Professor of Patristics and Orthodox Spirituality. A summa cum laude graduate of Holy Cross (1987), he completed his PhD in Patristics a...
Mother Katherine Weston: Healing Arts
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
 Nun Katherine Weston, an Orthodox Christian monastic, is a pastoral counselor and trauma specialist in private practice. For some 15 years, she has ...
Matt Hinton: Sacred Harp, Sacred Arts
20 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
 Matt Hinton, documentary filmmaker, rock guitarist, and burrito legend — for all these contributions, each so excellent, the world is a better pla...
Victoria Emily Jones: Art & Theology
30 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Victoria Emily Jones graduated from UNC–Chapel Hill in 2010 with a BA in journalism and English literature and a minor in music, and she has done so...
A LUMINOUS CHRISTMAS
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
 On this special episode of Luminous, our previous guests suggested for us their chosen musical selections that evoke the sacredness of the season. T...
Andrew Gould: The Architecture of Heaven
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Gould’s designs for churches and other buildings, as well as for furnishings within churches, are exquisitely beautiful. But they are more th...
Bruce Herman: Body, Beauty, Brokenness
10 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
 A world-renowned artist and great pedagogue, Bruce Herman speaks eloquently about what art is and what it means to him, notably at this time in his ...
Benedict Sheehan: Gestures of Music
27 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Owen Cyclops: Graphic Theology
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
John Michael Talbot: Here I Am, Lord
30 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
 A legend in the word of Christian Contemporary Music, John Michael Talbot’s songs have been the soundtrack for the spiritual life of more than a g...
Julian Davis Reid: Notes of Movement and Rest
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Artist-theologian Julian Davis Reid has performed and spoken worldwide, and has released albums both solo and with his band, the Ju Ju Exchange. Havin...
Pamela Smart: The Visceral Impact of Stillness
03 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Pamela Smart is fascinated by how art works on us, on the totality of our selves. That means she is interested in aesthetics, anthropology, and art hi...
Rebecca Hernandez: Indian Culture and Christian Sacred Art
13 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Hernandez, Mescalero and Warm Springs Apache, is involved in establishing and preserving community archives, as well consulting with museums and co...
Bissera Pentcheva: Hearing and Feeling the Visual
29 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Bissera Pentcheva is one of the rare art historians who reaches across disciplines: visual art, architecture, sound. This allows her to speak all the ...
Laurie Anderson: Transcending Performance
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Laurie Anderson is a living legend in the world of the arts. Her career, spanning from the late 1970’s right up to the present day, has resulted in ...
Adrienne Williams Boyarin: Literary Art & Identities of Faith
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Adrienne Williams Boyarin writes on religious material in medieval poetry, but she’s also been at the forefront of the important conversation on bri...
Mark Shapiro: Life Carries the Day
24 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Mark Shapiro is a major figure in the New York classical music scene, as music director of Cantori New York as well as several other award-winning ens...
Bozeman Brothers: Do Parallel Lines Touch?
10 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jamey and Lee Bozeman formed the new wave band Luxury decades before they became Fr. James and Fr. David, Orthodox Christian priests. The band’s jou...
Tõnu Kõrvits: Elegies to the Ethereal
28 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Tõnu Kõrvits has for some decades been a rising star among Estonian composers—one can now say that the star is decisively risen, and shines with t...
Kaupo Kikkas: The Luminous Image
13 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kaupo Kikkas is one of the most compelling photographers working today. Centering on portrait as well as fine art photography, with predilections for ...
David Bentley Hart: The Beauty of the Infinite
31 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
David Bentley Hart began his storied career as theologian and public intellectual with a book called The Beauty of the Infinite, a game-changing and d...
Frank Wilczek: The Physics of Beauty
16 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When a Nobel Prize-winning physicist begins to speak of the universe as “a work of art,” don’t we want to ask him whether the universe itself co...
Susan Ashbrook Harvey: The Olfactory Imagination
03 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Susan Ashbrook Harvey is one of the foremost scholars in her field of Late Antiquity (with a focus on Syriac Christianity). Two of her particular area...
Ivan Moody: Music In and Out of Liturgy
18 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Fr Ivan Moody is a world-renowned composer, conductor, scholar, author. His music often draws on ancient chant traditions and then takes off into new ...
Tobi Kahn: Shrines of Intention
28 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Tobi Kahn is a painter and sculptor whose work has been shown in over forty solo exhibitions and over sixty museum and group shows. For twenty-five ye...
Haig Utidjian: Dancing Voices, Singing Bodies
15 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dn Haig Utidjian is one of the foremost figures in the world of Armenian musicology, as well as in several other fields including Czech composers. A g...
Paul Barnes: In the Keys of Chant
30 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Barnes is a force of nature. His music, and his insights about music, pour out of him, with beauty. His longtime collaboration with Phillip Glass...
Rowan Williams: The Holy Arts and Holy Folly
16 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A conversation with one of today’s most brilliant and creative minds on creativity and holiness, through icons, poetry, fiction, monasticism, and so...
Robert Saler: Everything in its Right Place
02 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Rob Saler, an exciting and highly attuned theologian and culture maven, talks with Peter about the ways in which culture and theology learn from each ...
Christina Maranci: The Architectonics of History
26 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Christina Maranci is one of the world’s foremost scholars of Armenian sacred art. She has played an inestimable role in the display and understandin...
Gavin Bryars: Making Music Other
13 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Gavin Bryars is one of the leading experimental composers of his generation. Among his diverse and prodigious repertoire, his best known work remains ...
Gary Vikan: The Curation of Sacred Art
23 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Gary Vikan is one of the most renowned figures among art historians as well as in the world of museum curation. His bold, exciting, but also sensitive...
Savas of Pittsburgh: Reflecting on the Great American Bard
08 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Metropolitan Savas, one of the most culturally and intellectually engaged and curious people I know, talks with me about finding the sacred within the...
Lisa DeBoer: Visual Arts in the Worshiping Church
25 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Lisa DeBoer is an art historian, who since 1999 has been teaching at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of The Visual Ar...
Scott Cairns: The Poetic Potential
17 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Scott Cairns—poet, educator, and just a supremely wise dude, talks with Peter about how poetry works. But also about how the poetic can function thr...
James Jordan: The Musician's Spirit
10 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most influential, innovative, and inspired choral conductors and educators in the world, James Jordan has so much to tell us about the sacr...
Shawn "Thunder" Wallace: Amazing Grace in Every Place
03 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Shawn Wallace is many things—a master of the jazz idiom, a pedagogue, a social commentator, and a man of deep faith. Finding himself an Orthodox Chr...
Richard Viladesau: Aesthetics and the Art of Knowing
27 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Richard Viladesau is one of the masters of the field of theological aesthetics. His work has centered on philosophical theology, in particular the que...
Let my prayer arise! Music in the Experience of African American Orthodox Christians
20 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On a special episode of Luminous, we feature a six-way discussion on the experience of African American Orthodox Christians and the encounter with exi...
Krista West: The Sacred Art of the Vestment
13 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Sacred Art of the Vestment. Deeply gifted in the art of sewing and embroidery, also articulate in reflecting on her craft, Krista adds immeasurabl...
John Patitucci: The Soul of the Bass
06 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
One of the world’s greatest living bass players, and a person of deep faith, John and Peter have a lot to talk about, such as the inspiration behind...
Grant White: Liturgy and the Finnish Forest
23 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Peter and Grant talk about enchantment (and disenchantment), how to listen, learn from the religiously uncommitted. Oh yes and bricolage.
Jeremy Begbie: A “Thicker” Understanding of Beauty
16 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jeremy Begbie is one of the most incisive commentators on the relationship between arts and theology. We visit many fascinating destinations in this e...
Jonathan Pageau: The Patterns of Tradition
08 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Pageau is an icon-carver, graphic designer, and a public commentator on sacred art and the meaning of the symbolic world. In this episode Jonathan tal...
Annemarie Weyl Carr: The Sacred, Visible and Veiled
25 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
One of the great scholars and teachers of art history, specializing iniconography—especially in her beloved Cyprus—Prof. Carr talks about themeani...
Makoto Fujimura: Silence and Spirit in Visual Art
12 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A highly celebrated visual artist, Makoto Fujimura also reflects deeply onart, faith, and the need for cultural advocacy, through his books, mostrecen...
Margot Fassler: The Spiritual Cosmos in Music and Art
04 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Long-time professor of Liturgy and Music History, at Yale and Notre Dame, Margot talks with Peter about her work on Hildegard of Bingen—12th-century...
Junius Johnson: The Experience and Idea of Beauty
25 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Junius Johnson, a musician and theologian, has written eloquently about a theology of beauty. He talks with Peter about how there’s no acc...
David Rothenberg: Music in the Natural World
21 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
 Musician, philosopher, professor David Rothenberg is author of Nightingales in Berlin, also the subject of a feature-length documentary. His work re...