When we speak of compassion we think of human relationships. But the Cosmic Christ includes compassion for all of creation. In this essay, published in The Curator, I focus on a famous nineteenth-century landscape painting by Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes. In it, I explore the artist's vision of the land as the interconnectedness which characterizes paradise and includes the flow of compassion through all of nature.
The complete version of my original essay was published in Edge of Faith Magazine for the June 2021 issue on the theme Environment. It includes an introduction to the nature of the Cosmic Christ and ideas about the application of this understanding to our current environmental crisis.
Frederic Edwin Church
Heart of the Andes
1859