The Christian Imagination: The Imago Dei in the Age of AI with Stephen Crotts
Jason Craig sits down with Stephen Crotts—illustrator of Malcolm Guite's Galahad and the Grail—to talk about what it means to be a maker in an age of AI slop, why creativity is a duty rooted in the Imago Dei, and how recovering a sense of place is essential to being human.
In This Episode, We Cover:
- Why AI can never bear the Imago Dei—and what that means for human art and expression
- The difference between dominion and domination, and how a Christian view of creation shapes an artist's work
- How building a home culture of making—music, art, and craft—forms children and families
- The ancient process of woodcut printmaking and why embodied craft matters in a disembodied age
- Why art belongs in its proper context and what we lose when it's pulled from worship into the museum
Chapters:
- 00:00 Introduction
- 02:23 AI and the Image of God
- 04:00 Growing up in a creative family
- 08:30 Dominion vs. domination: a Christian view of creation
- 16:30 Building a culture of music and making at home
- 24:15 The woodcut printmaking process
- 27:40 "It's not expression if it's not made by humans"
- 34:10 Art at its highest is devotional
- 38:40 What it means for art to have meaning
- 45:08 Finding local stories and images to focus on
Resources Mentioned:
- Galahad and the Grail by Malcolm Guite, illustrated by Stephen Crotts
- Stephen Crotts' website
- "A British Eucharistic Odyssey: Galahad and the Grail Reviewed" by Theo Howard
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Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.
