Expressions of Peace

Photographs by William F. Brown
Text by Robert St. Louis

Pope John Paul II writes that we live at a time when "prayer is directed a precise moment in history which highlights the 'fullness of time' marked by the year 2000" (Dominum et Vivificantem, 1986). The eschatological significance of his remark may become clearer as we approach the Third Millenium. The authors of this exhibit present it in the hope, even the expectation, that a season of inner peace approaches.

With images and words, William F. Brown and Ralph St. Louis, both on the faculty of the University of Evansville, try to draw us into a meditation on peace. For photographer and writer, the thingness of our everyday world is constantly challenging. Our primary human responsibility, they believe, is to use the thingness of our world to define an inner consciousness that accepts and surrenders to the given. For them peace is founded on just this lack of tension between object and response, between image and sentence. Thus for both, peace is an inner condition that comes about only by means of a continual struggle for separation from the need to evaluate, to define the self against the ordinary. The authors of this exhibit also note that their exhibit has been particularly inspired by the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tsu, the recent encyclicals of Pope John Paul II, and the prophetic messages that have been attributed to the Queen of Peace at Medjugorje, Yugoslavia. --- Ralph St. Louis

Ralph St. Louis, Ph.D. has taught more than twenty years at the University of Evansville. An associate professor of English, he directed the University's graduate program in the humanities for a decade, is currently especially active in non-traditional adult education, and has published both scholarly and creative work in a variety of recognized journals.

William F. Brown is an associate professor of art at the University of Evansville and has taught at universities in Illinois, Arkansas and West Virginia. Prior to teaching, William worked as a commercial artist for six years in Chicago. He received an M.F.A. from the Chicago Art Institute, exhibits extensively as a painter, draftsman and photographer, and is included in numerous private and corporate collections.

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