The Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at St. Louis University bills itself as "the world's first interfaith museum of contemporary art that engages religious and spiritual themes." Until another institution steps up and challenges its claim, we gladly take it at its word.

Founded 15 years ago by the Rev. Terrence Dempsey, the museum is celebrating its anniversary. "Pursuit of the Spirit" is a retrospective of the 35 exhibitions, featuring more than 160 artists, that it has presented.

The museum occupies a desacralized chapel previously used by Jesuit priests on the university campus. Its location and history and the architectural structure in which it exists give it a strong Christian, specifically Roman Catholic, identity. But under Dempsey's directorship, the ecumenical nature of the work exhibited has been clear.

Indeed, two of the strongest works shown in the chapel's former nave are a powerful oil-and-wax painting by Michael David of a Star of David memorializing Jews killed in the Holocaust and other persecutions, and a series of Polaroid photographs steeped in Santeria, the Caribbean amalgam of Catholicism and African spiritualism, by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons.

The most commanding work in the show, however, is Michael Tracy's monumental abstract triptych "11th, 12th, and 13th Stations of the Cross for Latin America: La Pasion." Semipermanently installed in the apse, it is often walled off from whatever else is on view. For the anniversary exhibition, it has been unveiled. Its intensity and scale overpower everything else in the show, reinforcing the museum's Catholic origins.

In the side chapels are works derived from Buddhist and Muslim traditions, as well as Christian.

Overall, however, the tenor in general is spiritual, not religious, and that can be a problem.

Spirituality as a concept and an image tends to be soft and squishy. One person's spirituality is another's hogwash. Spirituality tends to lack the rigor and structure — and the rules — of religion. In this country, it conjures memories of brown rice, long hair and Birkenstocks.

There are no standards and conventions for spiritual art. With religious art, you know what you're looking at — at least some of the time.

In the Christian tradition that dominated Western art for more than 1,000 years, there's iconography: the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt, the Madonna and Child, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, all rendered in thousands of paintings, sculptures and prints, all clearly understood as vehicles for meditation, reverence and transcendence.

In Asian traditions, there's Buddha and his Bodhisattvas, Vishnu and Krishna and a confraternity of saints more populous even than Roman Catholicism's.

But what do we do with Seyed Alavi's small, hemispherical bowl half-filled with honey? It is undoubtedly beautiful, but is it spiritual? It could be the concoction of a Beverly Hills decorator happy to have found the right accent piece for a party of Hollywood big shots. Can it also be an object upon which to meditate?

Different by 180 degrees is DoDo Jin Ming's black-and-white photograph of a churning, turbulent sea. Truly, it evokes the 18th century sense of the sublime, but is it also a vehicle for spiritual transcendence?

A lot of "spiritual" works here lack the ballast of a recognizable religious tradition and don't achieve the sense of silence and stillness that Alavi's modest work does, or suggest the violence of the end of times of Jin Ming's dramatic photograph.

Despite the extremity of Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism manifesting itself across the world, this is largely an era of doubt or, for some, outright lack of belief in God and the spiritual world. Perhaps, in its next 15 years, the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art might challenge its biases by presenting an exhibition of contemporary artists whose work expresses skepticism about the spiritual.

That would be refreshing to audiences and it could help invigorate the museum's already vigorous program.

HAY IS FOR ... SCULPTURE

Art today can be made of anything: plastic bags, blocks of ice, beer cans, old lamps. Why not hay?

Craft artists have always used materials not associated with the fine arts, which traditionally limited itself to oil on canvas and marble or bronze. Now that everything goes, why shouldn't craft artists take advantage of the freedom?

That's the idea behind Craft Alliance's new gallery in its Grand Boulevard location. The show features work by craft-oriented artists that possesses the ambition and scale of contemporary sculpture.

Michael Shaughnessy's hay sculptures make an inspiring opening show. As soon as you walk into the gallery, you can smell the hay, and for anyone who grew up in farm territory, it is a comforting smell.

With the hay, harvested from local farms, Shaughnessy, who lives in Maine, has made a number of discrete works. A large corkscrew-shape form sprawls on the floor, occupying the main gallery space. Three works made of coiled lengths of hay, tied together with twine, are hung on the walls on metal rods. They look like the dreadlocks of a blond giant.

dbonetti@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8351