A 2020 Fetzer Institute study of U.S. spirituality both uses art as a tool to understand what respondents mean by “spirituality” and finds many of those studied see spiritual components in artmaking.
My article on the subject appears in the March issue of Sojourners magazine.
“Visual arts offer a new language in which to convey the spiritual and sacred in human experience,” Ashlee Whitaker, Brigham Young University Museum of Art’s curator of religious art, told me in an interview. “Rather than letters, words, rhyme, symbolic meter, they employ line, color, shade, textures to offer up expressions of the ineffable in a form of communication that can transcend language, geography, and cultures.”
My full article is available—bypassing the paywall—via this link in Sojourners. (The Fetzer study can be found here.)