This book presents a kind of spirituality that is not quiet or dreamy: a spirituality that deliberately struggles with the harsh realities of the world instead of trying to escape from them. It describes a new kind of relationship between the artist and the things she paints, and it offers an original view of the meaning of art and of the contribution the artist makes to society. It offers a fresh view of the connections between art and spirituality. It describes a marriage and a love that goes beyond mere romance and "sacrament." It offers a radical view of multiculturalism as something painful and demanding, and not merely a sentimental exoticism or mutual tolerance. It suggests a radical reconsideration of whether monotheism was really an advance over polytheism, and it offers an original view of what it means to say that God "created" the world.

This book will change your thinking about art, and about marriage, and about what it means to live as a foreigner in a country whose language is new to you; and it will remind you what it means to create your own life and to work to make the world a better place.

REVIEW ON NATIONAL ART EDUCATION ASSOCIATION WEBSITE (Jan. 2010)

In Why on Earth Does God Have to Paint, Rafael Chodos documents the artistic journey of his wife, Junko Chodos. Because Junko Chodos’ artistic process is a journey to the center of herself, Rafael Chodos asserts that Junko Chodos’ paintings and writings have established a new concept of art called centripetal art. He defines centripetal art as “art which seeks the center” and explains that “the artist journeys toward her center in order to encounter divine presence there.” He goes on to describe it as “a new kind of art, post-postmodern, which …brings about spiritual growth for both the artist and the viewer.” Rafael Chodos maintains that this type of spiritual art, centripetal art, could not have been created earlier, because of five specific social and intellectual developments that transformed the consciousness of the 20th century into the consciousness of the 21st century. These developments are: the impact of psychology (specifically Sigmund Freud’s theories), the impact of multiculturalism (and cultural exchange which, since the last half of the 20th century, has not been optional), the impact of World War II and fascism (which has deep psychological aspects, appealing to the individual’s fear of facing the responsibilities of freedom), the impact of existentialism and the total absence of complacency, and the impact of the atomic bomb and ecological concerns (the atomic bomb revealing that mankind could become an adversary to both itself and to the whole of creation). Rafael Chodos writes that these five influences combined to move the art world away from modernism and into postmodernism. From this, he asserts, emerged a new and complex spirituality, unveiled in Junko Chodos’ art: her mission being to transform the viewer through the images she creates.

Reviewed by Mary C. Nasser, Art Teacher at St. Dominic High School, O’Fallon, Missouri.

At http://staging.artedu.browsermedia.com/learning/media-reviews

The book is a powerful read: it defies genre classification... challenging, troubling, and disturbing, with flashes of illumination and the breakthrough of transcendence. The passages about how cultures become fluid and meld and transform each other in the furnace of marriage with the intensity of demands for integrity, send back reports from a frontier that we all need to understand. Karen Torjesen, Dean, School of Religion, Claremont Graduate University, Author of When Women Were Priests .