Danielle Shroyer

(Pre- PostScript: Hermeneutics simply means the method/theory of biblical interpretation.)

Hampton sent along a link to the work of artist Lauren DiCioccio in her comment to my Statistics as Art post below. I was so enamored by the picture and concept that I’ve been thinking about it off and on all day. DiCioccio takes old fashion magazine articles and assigns each letter a color, and then paints these little color dots over each character along the page. I think the results are stunning – YOU GUYS, I CANNOT STOP STARING AT IT! – so I bought myself the one pictured above to hang in my office.

Her artistic transformation of this Vogue article about who-knows-what got me thinking about the way we read Scripture- or, more broadly, the way we encounter Scripture. It’s often so hard to know how to restore a sense of wonder to Scripture verses and stories that have become trite and in many cases devoid of meaning or transformative power for us. (Familiarity can breed apathy just as much as the faceless numbers of statistics can.) This is especially true if you’ve been told what to believe about Scripture more often than you’ve actually encountered the stories of Scripture.

DiCioccio has made something like a modern-day version of an illustrated manuscript, which is one of the few things I adore about the Medieval Ages. (Crusades? No. Illustrated manuscripts? OUI.) These Medieval illustrated/illluminated manuscripts did more than just provide context for people who couldn’t read. They also implied that these stories are more than just words; not simply rules or laws but beauty and life abundant. They symbolize a devotion that is not staid but in action, the movement of God that happens in between even those words that may have become for us too familiar, bringing them back to life.

If DiCioccio can make a Vogue article look this beautiful, imagine what kind of transformative, creative power we’d feel if we could imagine Scripture in the same way?