Art Life Faith Podcast

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. I’m your host, Roger Lowther. This is our 50th podcast episode. Woo hoo! Happy birthday, Art Life Faith Podcast! I can’t believe we’ve done this 50 times now. I’m so grateful for all of you who’ve come along with us on this journey and who’ve supported this podcast in so many ways, by continuing to listen, by giving it five...

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. I’m your host, Roger Lowther. This is the show where we bring conversations and stories we’ve been having here in Japan and report them back to you, the listener, so that you too can join in the conversation from a distance. This is a chance for you to see and hear a little of what God is doing here in Japan. Well, leading into this summer, 2023...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Well, a lot of amazing things have been happening here in Tokyo these past few weeks. We’ve had five interns come from different parts of the United States. And we’ve been praying for a...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast, bringing this to you live from Tokyo. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. We host Art Life Faith gatherings every month. One reason we started this podcast was so that you could hear some of those stories. Most of the time, we gather...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, coming to you live from Tokyo. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Well, last week we had a team retreat in the mountains of Karuizawa, about a two-hour drive northwest of Tokyo. It really was a great time to get together before all...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast, live from Tokyo. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. This episode, I’d like to take a break from our regularly scheduled program to tell you a strange story from my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail with my wife, Abi. It comes fr...

This is the Art Life Faith podcast, live from Tokyo, Japan, where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith, especially in the context of foreign missions. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Today, I’d like to share a conversation we had with Mayuko Shono or Mayu for short. Her story is not new to this podcast. In fact, our very...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Well, March 11, 2023 is the 12th anniversary of that devastating earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that struck the nation of Japan, and a day that changed everything for me. During that time,...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Well, I got back late last night from a three-week trip to the US and I really pushed probably a little too hard, so I’m pretty tired, but glad to be back and looking forward to continuing the...

Immanuel: NOT ALONE Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast . This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Well, we’ve taken a little break from making podcasts over the New Year’s, but now we’re back and excited to share more stories with you. My family spent a little ti...

Merry Christmas everyone! Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Every month, I send out newsletters telling stories of missions through the arts—what’s happening here in Japan, how the arts are playing a role in church planting, and how the arts...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. For over a decade now, we’ve been hosting “Art Life Faith” gatherings around Tokyo where we share a meal together and then an artist, a different artist each time, shares a little bit about t...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast . This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. In previous podcasts, we’ve talked about the challenges of working as a Western classical musician in a global and missional context. In my first month in Japan, I was helping to lead worship on a pi...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. In the previous episode, I interviewed author Bruce Young and his wife Susan about his latest book, Living in Full View of the God of Grace . Thank you so much for your support of that book. We hit nu...

It’s been a while since our last podcast, a lot longer than I thought it would be! Our family was in the US for furlough, and then it was one thing after another. My son Aidan was in a terrible bike accident and had to be hospitalized for a month. And then had to drop out of college for a semester as he continued to meet with doctors and heal. I want to thank all of you who have been following him...

This is the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and I’m your host Roger Lowther. Today, I’d like to share a passage with you from Ecclesiastes 11:1–2: “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you know not what disaster may happen on earth.” These past few weeks we’ve been talking about the 3/11 disaster here in Japan. Boy is this...

https://youtu.be/4rw_dLttQDw Today I’d like to introduce you to Daisuke Yokoyama, an amazing Christian singer songwriter here in Japan. I had the privilege of meeting him in the relief movement shortly after that terrible earthquake of 2011. We’re listening to his song “希望は絶望に終わらない” (“Hope Will Not End In Despair”), part of his response to the terrible darkness of that time. I remember...

Over the past couple of podcasts, I’ve been sharing stories from our March Aroma of Beauty Conference. Today, I would like to share about the master of ceremonies for the conference, Akira Mori, pastor of Global Mission Chapel. He started the conference by saying, “As a man of Tohoku, I thank all of you!” Tohoku is the northeast region of Japan, and Iwaki where he pastors is the southern-most tip...

Last week, I shared with you the story of the tsunami violin, “The 1,000 Bonds of Hope” project. Nakazawa-san made a violin out of debris left by the tsunami and a sound post out of a small fragment from the Miracle Pine Tree, a symbol of hope throughout Japan. His work was not just creation but re- creation. He was literally redeeming brokenness in this world to make something life-giving. This v...

This week I’ve been working on putting subtitles to the various talks from our “Aroma of Beauty” conference we held here in Tokyo in March. There were so amazing stories shared. Although it was all in Japanese, with subtitles soon you’ll be able to watch and hear them as well. But I want to take this time to share one of them with you now in this podcast. It’s really exciting to me how God shows h...

Everyone in Japan knows the word setomono (セトモノ), because you find it on quite a few boxes you get in the mail. It means “fragile,” but it also literally means “product of Seto.” Seto is an art village known in Japan for its ceramics with over a 1,500 year history, longer if you count the indigenous people who lived there before that time. And today that pottery tradition is alive and well. La...

Exactly 19 years ago, my wife and I started our hike on the entire Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), 2,659 miles from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada. It took almost six months! My oldest son is about to go to college, and so he, his brother, and I will be hiking part of the Appalachian Trail this summer for a few weeks to celebrate as our family begins a furlough in the U.S. Planning for th...

I’d like to introduce you to a little poem. It’s kanshi , which literally means “Chinese poem.” Although, actually it’s not Chinese at all. It’s a Japanese poem, which uses only Chinese characters, in this case five per line. It’s almost like a puzzle, where Japanese take Chinese letters and work within quite a few rules to say something as beautifully as possible. This poem is by Ryok...

In the city of Minami Sanriku, on the northeastern coast of Japan, the Kanyo Hotel sits on a high cliff overlooking the ocean. This is a really nice hotel, which usually costs well over $300 a night to stay there. The food is amazing, and there is a really cool cave-like hot spring built into the side of the cliff, so you relax outside in hot spring waters while feeling cool sea wind blow in your...

A couple of weeks ago, Sawako-san, a woman in our church here in Tokyo, produced a musical comedy called Breast Wars . It’s a story about a woman in her 40s in her struggle with breast cancer. In one scene, she sits in the waiting room of the doctor’s office singing, with the clock ticking down, “Should I? Can I? Is there no other way?” while the nurses, while also singing, try to pull her into th...