Our Mission
“The artistic sensibility is impoverished by its divorce from the religious sensibility, the religious by its separation from the artistic.”
T. S. Eliot — Notes towards the Definition of Culture
For many centuries beauty held a prominent place in the life and worship of ordinary believers in forms such as music, visual art, drama, and architecture. Much of the world’s greatest art was inspired by the Christian faith, even financed by the church, for the glory of God and the education and enrichment of the people. Today much has changed. For a variety of reasons, many Christians have relegated art to the fringes of life. But what if T. S. Eliot is right, that religion and the arts belong in conversation together and can illuminate one another?
The Eliot Society exists to enrich the church and foster spiritual formation through the arts.
Since 2017, that question has shaped some fifty evenings together in the Annapolis area — lectures, chamber concerts, poetry and play readings, hands-on workshops, and the commissioning of new work — where artists and lovers of the arts grow in their enjoyment of, and participation in, God’s gift of beauty.
Our Faith
The Eliot Society is a Christian organization, ecumenical in spirit. We confess the faith of the historic Church as summarized in the Nicene Creed, and we belong to no single denomination.
Our gatherings welcome believers from across the Christian traditions — Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox — along with anyone drawn to the conversation between faith and the arts. What unites us is a conviction: that beauty is a gift of God, and that the riches of two thousand years of Christian art belong to the whole Church.
Why “Eliot”?
Our namesake is the poet T. S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets stands among the great works of Christian imagination in the modern age. Eliot embodied what we hope to recover: an artist who took his craft with utter seriousness, and a Christian who put that craft in the service of the permanent things. Our monthly digest, The Still Point, takes its name from his lines in Burnt Norton — “at the still point, there the dance is.”
Board of Directors
Justin Horst
Justin Horst is a co-founder of the Eliot Society. He holds degrees from Grove City College (B.S.E.E, 2008) and Johns Hopkins University (M.S., 2013) in Computer Engineering. Outside of his job as a software engineer for a D.C. area cybersecurity company, Justin enjoys reading, listening to music, and singing. Among his favorite authors are Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Roger Scruton.
Liz Horst
Liz Horst is a co-founder of the Eliot Society. She studied music and English literature at Grove City College and lives now with her husband and three children in Maryland. An avid reader and writer by night, Liz works by day as a Suzuki violin teacher in her home studio. Her favorite artists include William Blake, Walker Percy, Annie Dillard, and T.S. Eliot.
Heidi Stevens
Heidi Stevens is the Director of Fine Arts at a classical Christian school near Annapolis. She studied vocal performance at Concordia University in Ann Arbor, theology at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, and Drawing and Painting at the Schuler School in Baltimore. Before serving in her current role, she taught Drawing and Painting for over twenty years. Heidi’s great loves include painting, traveling, and writing. Among her favorite artists and authors are Johannes Vermeer, Edward Hopper, John Ruskin, and Annie Dillard.
Victoria Jones
Victoria Jones studied journalism, English literature, and music at UNC–Chapel Hill, with postgraduate coursework in worship and the arts at Regent College in Vancouver. She works as an editorial freelancer and blogs at ArtandTheology.org, where she explores how the arts can stimulate renewed theological engagement with the Bible. She is the art curator for the Daily Prayer Project, a DC-based liturgical publication, and a contributor to the Visual Commentary on Scripture. Among her favorite sacred artists are Arcabas, Julia Stankova, and Jyoti Sahi. Follow her on Instagram @art_and_theology.
Board Advisors: Monica Godfrey · Fr. T.J. Thigpen · Fr. Wesley Walker
Eliot Society Fellows
We are honored to count these past speakers among the friends of the Eliot Society.
Ken Myers · Michael Hanby · Gregory Wilbur · Philip Bess · Janice Brown · Gary Hotham · Stephen Coleman · Margaret Adams Parker · William Edgar · Andrew Lazo · John Skillen · Junius Johnson · Carolyn Weber · Chip Crane · J.D. Head · Libby John · Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt · Paul Munson · Katrina Atsinger · Roger Lowther · Grace Hamman · Ned Bustard · Joey Tomassoni · Sarah Reardon · Matthew Clark · Heidi White