Executive Director
Brian is the founder and director of the Anselm Society, a Colorado-based organization dedicated to a renaissance of the Christian imagination.
Since receiving his B.A. in political theory from Princeton, Brian has worked for various think tanks and as a strategy consultant with over a hundred organizations in the theology, worldview, and culture space. He is a speaker and the author of numerous articles and essays. He was a contributing author to “Why Place Matters,” edited by Wilfred McClay.
Brian has a thoroughly intemperate fascination with fairy tales and the novels of Jane Austen, is an amateur cocktail mixologist, and draws and plays the piano “very ill.” He and his wife Christina share their love of beauty with their two small children, Edmund and Edith.
Content
Clips
A threefold theology of how to fix our relationship with material reality.
The Anselm Society’s executive director, Brian Brown, was a guest on The Habit Podcast with Jonathan Rogers, to discuss how our creativity relates to God’s.
“I didn’t just want examples, I wanted explanations.”
We need the best stories, music, movies, and more in our communities and congregations. But how?
An interview with Anselm director Brian Brown in the Circe Institute’s Forma Journal.
Read about the vision for the Anselm Society, why we didn't pick an easier name, the role of artists in a church, and what Firefly can teach us about community.
A five-part class by Brian Brown on what the saints have to offer our Christian imaginations.
Brian Brown’s opening lecture from Imagination Redeemed 2021.
Understanding the dignity and responsibility inherent in the role of naming not only allows us to better understand our relationship with the created order, but also our relationship with God, the first Creator and Namer.
In this episode, Glenn Paauw shows us how the movement of the biblical narrative is always toward God entering into our time more and more deeply.
In this episode, Heidi White explores the posture that can enable Christians to be conservers of the goodness and beauty they’ve inherited, and restorers of things that have been broken.
Matthew Clark reads his chapter on subcreation. When we understand it properly, our subcreation is a middle act between God’s first creation and His second—and the culture we build together becomes, as Andy Crouch put it, part of “the furniture of eternity.”
Christina Brown and Amy Lee share about the art of gardening and God's story.
In this episode, Brooke McIntire reads Gracy Olmstead's essay exploring how a posture of cultivation equips us to create as God made us to create.
In this lecture, Heidi explores the two different attitudes we can have toward the past, and how each needs the other in order to healthily live in the present.
In this episode, Brooke McIntire shares this month's essay by Heidi White on mythmaking, and the questions surrounding creation as an act of shared memory.
Malcolm Guite makes the case that Christ's incarnation is the spark of Christian creativity.
In this episode, Brian kicks off this month's theme of "Imago Dei" by sharing Peter Leithart's essay Creators Imaging the Creator, which explores the hinge question of our "Why We Create" series: what does it mean to be human?
Brian welcomes back writer and storyteller Leslie Bustard to talk about how to cultivate thankfulness, and how it helps us to live well in the present moment.
After the conversation with Corey about how Bergson's theory of time influenced the literature of Lewis and Eliot, Jane and Corey take us into T.S. Eliot's poem The Four Quartets to show us an example of these ideas in the text.
Join Brian, Jane, and special guest Corey Latta as they dig deeper into the philosophies that influenced Lewis and Eliot's theology of time, and consequently some of their most famous works like The Screwtape Letters and The Four Quartets.
Join Brian in a conversation with Ned Bustard about time travel, Doctor Who, and the big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.
What if time is more than the passing of moments? What if it’s a gift to help us find meaning?
How should we, who have had eternity opened to us, approach the realities of living in a time-bound world that still wrestles with evil?
Brian reads Hans Boersma’s essay on how to live in the created order so that we can better know the Creator Himself.
God's workmanship and His character are crackling through every fiber of the world that we live in.
Creation is redeemed, not abandoned, because creation tells the story of God’s glory in its own unique way. Brian shares Paul Buckley's essay to help us better understand how to read the "book of Creation."
Brian and Heidi tee up a big question: what’s the relationship between eternity and what I do with my time now?
In which we kick off the 2022 season with an introduction to creation theology, and an explanation of everything that is to come this season.
What happened when Pastor Kevin Boaz invited a member of his congregation (Amy Lee) to read an original story on Sunday morning.
With iconographer Jonathan Pageau: how can we be people who are defined by seeking magic and meaning even in tough times? How can we build creative practices and communal rhythms that foster such a perspective?
In our continuing series discussing the unique call of the Christian artist ("centric genius"), Brian interviews Lancia Smith about her work with The Cultivating Project.
In our continuing series discussing the unique call of the Christian artist ("centric genius"), Brian talks with John Skillen about the ways in which the church used to create art together...and just maybe, how it can do so again.
In which Brian, Heidi, and Lancia summarize the concept of the "centric genius" and discuss its implications for both artists and churches.
Does Father Christmas belong in Narnia? Brian picks a fight, we continue Lewis and Tolkien's debate, and along the way, we hit on how to portray morality in literature, and even the true meaning of Christmas gifts.
Anselm director Brian Brown recently wrote a letter to the Anselm leadership team, which he gave permission to the Cultivating Project to publish.