Excerpt from Each With His Own Brush: Contemporary Christian Art in Asia and AfricaJust before Epiphany, or Good Friday, or in connection with some parable, we might turn to relevant pictures and let them make our thought of the Christ more universal. Or, imagining we are in the position of consultants in any given country, we may attempt to decide which pictures, if any, we would dis courage as missing a true Christian interpretation; which we would justify as being distinctly edifying or didactic, possibly as a Biblia Pauperum for the unlearned such as Christian artists began to paint in the fifth and sixth centuries; and which we would approve mainly because of the sheer artistic satisfaction they give. In order to grasp the ultimate burden of a given picture, rather than merely to like or to dislike it, we shall doubtless wish to learn whether these artists of various lands are thinking the same thoughts, merely expressing them in their own ways; or whether they represent diverse interpretations of the Christian faith. In our aspiration to develop an ecumenical Christian conscious ness, we may not be able to visit in person the various areas of our world Christian community; but we can through art expand our imaginations and increase the flexibility of our minds, so that we can pass without a jar and with genuine appreciation from one regional artistic expression to another.One of the obvious gains for the younger churches from indigenous Chris tian art is that it helps to remove the foreign aspect of Christianity. It helps to dissipate the deadly prejudice which regards the church as an alien cult. In these days of excessive nationalism the more our universal faith can be freed from its distinctively Western accessories the less likely is it to be boycotted in some anti-western trend. That there are Western accessories is manifest when an African priest can say that for the Bantu to be a Christian was to behave like a white man, or when we are told that a Madonna of the Italian type, holding her baby in a way unknown to an African mother, remains an alien.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.