Curator Louise Yelin views a painting that Hindu leaders want removed from the Neuberger Museum at Purchase College. (Carucha L. Meuse/The Journal News)Religion and art seem to be in hot contention in the blogosphere of late. At Blogging Religiously, reporter Gary Stern discusses a controversial painting of the Hindu goddess Kali on display at a State University of New York museum.

Also, in the Guardian’s Belief section, the editors are asking readers and columnists, “Does God have all the best art?“:

On Monday, at Tate Britain, the finest fruits of (largely irreligious) contemporary will be held up for judgment. This year, as every year, many will deride the Turner prize as a showcase for art’s failure to engage the public and to move us. If, indeed, there’s anything in that sentiment, would divinely inspired work be any better? Were the renaissance masters good because of God, or is it merely coincidence?

In her response to the Guardian‘s question, Mary Kenny writes:

So it is the very source and seedbed of our artistic heritage. You cannot understand European art without a knowledge of Christian (and Jewish) traditions. Biblical themes clearly served so many great artists from the early Christian period onwards, animated their imagination, gave them themes on which to work – and, of course, provided them with patronage, especially once the Medici popes came along (the more corrupt the popes, it is said, the more they patronised the arts).

But I would say there was something else to the great flowering of European art in Christendom, as Europe once called itself. The artists themselves were not necessarily perfectly pious Christians, but they shared in a general idea that there is something higher than ourselves. Man is not the measure of all things. He must aspire to something better, loftier, more extraordinary and miraculous. That idea helped to build the great cathedrals of Europe, just as it prompted the development of music. Not all religious art is to everyone’s taste, but it was the fountainhead of the staggering achievement that is European art.

Read more at the Guardian and Blogging Religiously.