Jennifer Champoux is a scholar of Latter-day Saint visual art and a co-editor of Approaching the Tree: Interpreting 1 Nephi 8, forthcoming from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute. Her current projects include directing the Book of Mormon Art Catalog (a digital database launching soon) and writing a book on artist C. C. A. Christensen for the Introductions to Mormon Thought series published by the University of Illinois Press.

I write this from 40,000 feet over the Atlantic, returning home after the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities (MSH) conference at Pembroke College, Oxford. This year’s theme of “aesthetics” fostered a lively discussion about the meaning and function of art within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Among the presenters was Mark Wrathall, who, drawing on Nietzsche, postulated that the experience of true beauty (encompassing the lovely and agreeable as well as the challenging and painful) creates a new reality and teaches us to feel differently.[1] His remarks made me wonder, does Latter-day Saint religious art allow for true beauty understood this way? Can it initiate an emotional response that opens a space for discovery and revelation? Does it make us uncomfortable in a way that reorients us? Or does it sanitize our experience of discipleship and keep us at arm’s length from the messiness of life?

              These are the kinds of questions asked in Gary Ettari’s new Mormonism, Empathy, and Aesthetics: Beholding the Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), which makes a significant contribution to the growing field of art scholarship in the Latter-day Saint tradition. Ettari is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His fascinating book fruitfully draws from early Christian thinkers, Latter-day Saint rhetoric and scripture, and contemporary neurological and aesthetic theories to examine religious art.

Reflecting on ideas about the human body, Ettari explores various reasons why many Church members harbor reservations about the power and use of art. He considers the celebrated symbiotic relationship between the soul and body in Church doctrine, as well as a mistrust of the body evident in Latter-day Saint thought. Similarly, he shows how art tends to be viewed within Latter-day Saint frameworks in a binary way as either a power for good or a power for evil. With examples of statements by Church leaders, Ettari shows that, when it comes to aesthetic response, “Mormon leaders generally counsel caution and moral sensitivity rather than empathy.”[2]

To escape this dichotomy, Ettari considers how alternative understandings of the body can allow for an aesthetic of empathy. Ettari asks, “If…empathy and compassion are what Christ models through his bodily suffering and if, in the Mormon context, disciples of Christ are commanded to model Christ’s behavior and, indeed, his emotional responses, in their own lives, how might such an injunction influence how Mormons think about art and its effect upon the body and the spirit?”[3] By centering the role of the body in Church doctrine, Ettari’s book lays out the possibility for Latter-day Saint art to embrace an expansive aesthetic that encourages a felt response from the viewer.

This empathetic engagement, it is argued, then works to facilitate a sense of shared humanity as well as a closeness with the divine. “The reception of art,” Ettari claims, “when considered through the lens of bodily empathy as it exists in Mormon theology and scripture may enable a more profound sense of connection with the larger human family than does viewing art through the lens of Mormon historical or scriptural literalism.”[4] Despite a historical mistrust of the body and of art, as well as a long-standing approach to art that has emphasized didacticism, Ettari sees possibilities for Latter-day Saint art, and ultimately he paints an optimistic picture of the potential for art to illuminate and even enhance the Church’s uniquely material and relational theology by allowing for a bodily response to art.

After discussing themes of embodiment and aesthetics in “Mormon thought,” Ettari spends the final third of the book analyzing how these understandings and tensions play out in the work of a handful of Latter-day Saint literary and visual artists. He focuses on the poetry of Lance Larsen and Kimberly Johnson and on the paintings of Trevor Southey and Walter Rane. While these are worthy artists with compelling artworks that feature the body, an unavoidable question is what could be added to the ideas of embodiment and empathy among Church members when considering other artists from a greater variety of backgrounds and cultures.

Additionally, the paintings selected for discussion all feature the male body and male experience. What would it look like to visualize contemporary Latter-day Saint women’s beliefs and lived, embodied experiences? It might look something like Sarah Winegar’s 2019 woodblock print, Making Room. The nude figure of a woman fills the picture plane, and at the center, she uses her own hands to pull apart the flesh of her abdomen, revealing the red space inside. Making Room is a piece that responds to the call for true beauty in art by confronting the viewer with a display of embodiment that is challenging and grotesque, and yet makes space for a reorientation and an empathetic response. It is not an easy piece to look at, and it doesn’t offer easy answers, but it makes the viewer feel deeply and points to the body’s role in both our physical and spiritual lives. This print does the kind of work that Ettari encourages: a visualization that functions “as a kind of empathetic mirror in that it reminds us not only of our own embodiment, but also of our bodily connections both to other human beings and to God.”[5]

In the end, these connections ought to be an important objective of religious art. Last weekend the MSH conference participants packed into the choir stalls of an Anglican chapel in Oxford to hear the keynote address by Rev. Dr. Andrew Teal, chaplain of Pembroke College and a scholar of aesthetics. In response to a question about how the Church might emulate some of the awe-inspiring splendor of the Pembroke Chapel, Teal pointed out that while his own church is fortunate to have inherited those sacred spaces, the pews are no longer filled with bodies as they are in Latter-day Saint Sunday services. He suggested a balance must be achieved between the aesthetic qualities of a space and the living heart of the community that inhabits it. This is just the sort of aesthetic response advocated for by Ettari, who sees art’s function as disruptive in a way that leads to greater fulfillment of the commandments to love God and to love our fellow beings. With that possibility in mind, I’m feeling hopeful about a kind of religious art that not only teaches us our history but also teaches us to feel.

[1] Mark Wrathall, “Beauty, Power, and Hierarchy,” Paper presented at the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference, 25 March 2022, Pembroke College, Oxford.

[2] Gary Ettari, Mormonism, Empathy, and Aesthetics: Beholding the Body (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 59.

[3] Ettari, Mormonism, Empathy, and Aesthetics, 57.

[4] Ettari, Mormonism, Empathy, and Aesthetics, 189.

[5] Ettari, Mormonism, Empathy, and Aesthetics, 186.