Makoto Fujimura was born in Boston, educated at Bucknell University and received his MFA from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music as a National Scholar in Nihonga (Japanese-style painting). The University bought his thesis painting. He is also the youngest artist ever to have a piece acquired by the Museum of Comtemporary Art in Tokyo. He is finishing a six-year term on the National Council on the Arts and he is a founding elder at Village Church in New York City.

With his home being three blocks from Ground Zero, Fujimura spends a lot of time reflecting on imagination and creativity gone awry. Fujimura is very clear that artists, especially those who are Christ-followers, need to take their place in the tradition of those who have asked the 500-year old question: what ideas, what art, what vision in our current culture has the capacity to affect humanity for more than five hundred years? (This is the opposite of Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame that seems to permeate so much of contemporary society.)

The essays are informational—such as on Japanese paper-making and rating college tour guides—yet reflective on the bigger issues of living out one’s faith in the midst of large cultural issues with a plea for artists to speak honestly to those issues.

These essays stand on their own and deserve to be read one at a time. It is the kind of book an artist, especially ones who seek to follow Christ, could use as spring-boards for their own journal reflections. Too often the Church eschews art as unnecessary and there is an increasing trend to build “multi-purpose auditoriums” for worship. Does the lack of beauty in those places affect the way we worship, the way we feel about God? How about our neighborhoods? Our homes? Fujimura’s essays force us to look at those questions and do all we can with our own form of creativity to answer them well.