The Sacred in Art is About More Than Religion. It's Humanist.

THE GUARDIAN
By Kenan Malik for New Humanist

A detail from Dante and the Divine Comedy, by Domenico di Michelino.

UNITED KINGDOM---There is a passage in Marilynne Robinson's novel "Gilead" in which the main character John Ames, a pastor, is walking to his church, and comes across a young couple ahead of him in the street. It is a wonderful, luminous passage, typical of Robinson's ability to discover the poetic even in the most mundane. There is in Robinson's writing a spiritual force that clearly springs from her religious faith. It is nevertheless a spiritual force that transcends the merely religious. The importance of the humanist impulse is that it helped break the shackles of the sacred while maintaining the sense of the transcendent. That is why to read Marilynne Robinson, to gaze upon a Rothko, to listen to Olivier Messiaen can feel so essential. [link]