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This volume explores how the visual arts are presenting and responding to Christian theology and demonstrates how modern and contemporary artists and artworks have actively engaged in conversation with Christianity. Modern intellectual enquiry has often been reluctant to engage theology as an enriching or useful form of visual analysis, but critics are increasingly revisiting religious narratives and Christian thought in pursuit of understanding our present-day visual culture. In this book an international group of contributors demonstrate how theology is often implicit within artworks and how, regardless of a viewer’s personal faith, it can become implicit in a viewer’s visual encounter...
Sheona Beaumont addresses the untold story of biblical subjects in photography. She argues that stories, characters, and symbols from the Bible are found to pervade photographic practices and ideas, across the worlds of advertising and reportage, the book and the gallery, in theoretical discourse and in the words of photographers themselves. Beaumont engages interpretative tools from biblical reception studies, art history, and visual culture criticism in order to present four terms for describing photography's latent spirituality: the index, the icon, the tableau, and the vision. Throughout her journey she includes lively discussion of selected fine art photography dealing with the Bible in surprising ways, from images by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 19th century to David Mach in the 21st. Far from telling a secular story, photography and the conditions of its representations are exposed in theological depth.; Beaumont skillfully interweaves discussion of the images and theology, arguing for the dynamic and potent voice of the Bible in photography and enriching visual culture criticism with a renewed religious understanding.
The essays in this volume aim to contribute to the newly developing academic subject of biblical spirituality. It is prompted by the belief that, although the Christian tradition has always nurtured an emphasis on spirituality rooted in the Bible and its interpretation, few biblical scholars, until recently, have pursued their work by making connections with either this religious tradition or present-day interest in the broader phenomenon of spirituality. Spiritual interpretation has overlaps with theological interpretation but is distinctive because of its focus on the wisdom of lived experience and practice. The essays therefore attempt, from within the context of the academy, responsible readings of Scripture that have as a major focus the study of how particular texts might contribute to a spirituality in which individual and communal flourishing is a major feature. The essays began as papers produced for an international symposium on the Bible and Spirituality in May 2012, hosted by the Centre for the Study of the Bible and Spirituality in the School of Humanities at the University of Gloucestershire.
A Biblical Perspective on What It Means to Be Human This major work by a widely respected Old Testament scholar and theologian unpacks a biblical perspective on fundamental questions of what it means to be human. J. Gordon McConville explores how a biblical view of humanity provides a foundation for Christian reflection on ethics, economics, politics, and church life and practice. The book shows that the Old Testament's view of humanity as "earthed" and "embodied" plays an essential part in a well-rounded Christian theology and spirituality, and applies the theological concept of the "image of God" to all areas of human existence.
Scenography and Art History reimagines scenography as a critical concept for art history, and is the first book to demonstrate the importance and usefulness of this concept for art historians and scholars in related fields. It provides a vital evaluation of the contemporary importance of scenography as a critical tool for art historians and scholars from related branches of study addressing phenomena such as witchy designs, Early Modern festival books, live rock performances, digital fashion photography, and outdoor dance interventions. With its nuanced and detailed case studies, this book is an innovative contribution to ongoing debates within art history and visual studies concerning multi...
What is a feminist theologian to do with Christianity's patriarchal inheritance? She can avoid the most patriarchal aspects of the theological tradition and seek resources for constructive work elsewhere. Or she can critique misogynistic texts and artifacts, exposing their strategies of domination to warn against replicating them. Both approaches have merits and yet, without other interpretive strategies, they reaffirm that the theological tradition does not belong to women and others marginalized by gender. They cannot transform the discourse. But within feminist theology are the seeds of another approach, aimed at just such transformation by reworking the theological landscape to become ho...
In critical yet appreciative dialogue with four different art critics who demonstrated theological sensitivities, Adam Edward Carnehl traces an ongoing religious conversation that ran through nineteenth-century aesthetics. In Carnehl's estimation, this critical conversation between the John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, culminated in the brilliant approach of G. K. Chesterton, who began his journalistic career with a series of insightful works of art criticism. By conducting a close reading of these largely neglected works, Carnehl demonstrates that Chesterton developed a theological aesthetic that focuses us on the revelation of God's image in every human being. In Chesterton's eyes, only those made in God's image can produce images themselves, and only those who receive a revelation of truth are able to reveal truths for others. Art is therefore a rich and symbolic unveiling of the truth of humanity which finds its origin and purpose in God the Divine Artist.
Captures the multiple voices of Christian theology in a diverse and interconnected world through in-depth studies of representative figures and overviews of key movements Providing an unparalleled overview of the subject, The Modern Theologians provides an indispensable guide to the diverse approaches and perspectives within Christian theology from the early twentieth century to the present. Each chapter is written by a leading scholar and explores the development and trajectory of modern theology while presenting critical accounts of a broad range of relevant topics and representative thinkers. The fourth edition of The Modern Theologians is fully updated to provide readers with a clear pic...
This book asks what theological messages theologically educated Catholics in late-eighteenth-century Prague might have perceived in Mozart’s late opera seria La clemenza di Tito. The book’s thesis is two-fold: first, that Catholics might have heard the opera’s advocacy of enlightened absolutism as a celebration of a distinctly Catholic understanding of political governance; and second, that they might have found in the opera a metaphor for the relationship between a gracious God and humanity caught up in sin, expressed as sexual concupiscence, pride, and lust for power. The book develops its interpretation of the opera through narrative character analyses of the main protagonists, an examination of their dramatic development, and by paying attention to the biblical and theological associations they may have evoked in a Catholic audience. The book is geared towards academic readers interested in opera, theologians, historians, and those who work at the intersection of theology and the arts. It contributes to a better understanding of the theological implications of Mozart’s operatic work.
This book is the first substantial study of the presence and relationship with the concepts of apocalypse, eschatology, and millennium in modern British art from 1914 to 1945, addressing how and why practitioners in both religious and secular spheres turned to the subjects. The volume examines British art and visual culture’s relationship with the then-contemporary anxieties and hopes regarding the orientation of society and culture, arguing that there is an acute relationship to the particular forms of cultural discourse of eschatology, apocalypse, and millennium. Chapters identify the continued relevance of religion and religious themes in British art during the period, and demonstrate t...