Routledge Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts
About the Book Series
What have imagination and the arts to do with theology? For much of the modern era, the answer has been 'not much'. It is precisely this deficit that this series seeks to redress. For, whatever role they have or have not been granted in the theological disciplines, imagination and the arts are undeniably bound up with how we as human beings think, learn and communicate, engage with and respond to our physical and social environments and, in particular, our awareness and experience of that which transcends our own creatureliness. The arts are playing an increasingly significant role in the way people come to terms with the world; at the same time, artists of many disciplines are showing a willingness to engage with religious or theological themes. A spate of publications and courses in many educational institutions has already established this field as one of fast-growing concern. This series taps into a burgeoning intellectual concern on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. The peculiar inter-disciplinarity of theology, and the growing interest in imagination and the arts in many different fields of human concern, afford the opportunity for a series that has its roots sunk in varied and diverse intellectual soils, while focused around a coherent theological question: How are imagination and the arts involved in the shaping and reshaping of our humanity as part of the creative and redemptive purposes of God, and what roles do they perform in the theological enterprise? Many projects within the series have particular links to the work of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the University of St Andrews, and to the Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts at Duke University.
Holman Hunt and the Light of the World in Oxford
1st Edition
Edited
By Markus Bockmuehl
November 12, 2024
This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the religious and artistic story behind The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt. Created in the mid-nineteenth century, it is often said to be the most widely exhibited work of art in history and remains one of the most widely known Christian ...
Theological Anthropology in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito: Sin, Grace, and Conversion
1st Edition
By Steffen Lösel
January 29, 2024
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 ...
Transforming Christian Thought in the Visual Arts: Theology, Aesthetics, and Practice
1st Edition
Edited
By Sheona Beaumont, Madeleine Emerald Thiele
January 09, 2023
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 ...
God’s Song and Music’s Meanings: Theology, Liturgy, and Musicology in Dialogue
1st Edition
Edited
By James Hawkey, Ben Quash, Vernon White
July 23, 2019
Taking seriously the practice and not just the theory of music, this ground-breaking collection of essays establishes a new standard for the interdisciplinary conversation between theology, musicology, and liturgical studies. The public making of music in our society happens more often in the ...
Kierkegaard, Aesthetics, and Selfhood: The Art of Subjectivity
1st Edition
By Peder Jothen
February 12, 2018
In the digital world, Kierkegaard's thought is valuable in thinking about aesthetics as a component of human development, both including but moving beyond the religious context as its primary center of meaning. Seeing human formation as interrelated with aesthetics makes art a vital dimension of ...
Redeeming Beauty: Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics
1st Edition
By Aidan Nichols O.P.
May 09, 2017
Redeeming Beauty explores the richness of orthodox Christian tradition, both Western and Eastern, in matters of 'sacral aesthetics' - a term used to denote the foundations, production and experience of religiously relevant beauty. Aidan Nichols investigates five principal themes: the foundation ...
Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination
1st Edition
By Malcolm Guite
March 22, 2017
Faith, Hope and Poetry explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, Malcolm Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the ...
Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer's The Glass of Vision With Critical Commentary
1st Edition
Edited
By Robert MacSwain
November 17, 2016
This book offers a critical edition of arguably the greatest work of English theology in the 20th century: Austin Farrer's Bampton Lectures published as The Glass of Vision in 1948. Farrer was an interdisciplinary genius who made original contributions to philosophy, theology, and biblical studies,...
An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste
1st Edition
By Joeri Schrijvers
November 10, 2016
Introducing the thought of philosopher and theologian Jean-Yves Lacoste, this book provides an overview spanning Lacoste's earliest works on sacramentality to his latest work Etre en Danger (2011) in which Lacoste opens up the liturgical experience onto a spiritual experience of life. Schrijvers ...
Theological Aesthetics after von Balthasar
1st Edition
Edited
By James Fodor, Stan Hawkins, Oleg V. Bychkov
October 19, 2016
This collection of essays by distinguished authors explores the present-day field of theological aesthetics: from von Balthasar’s contribution and parallel developments to correctives and alternatives to his approach. A tribute to von Balthasar’s own project expands into a dialogue with ancient and...
Art, Imagination and Christian Hope: Patterns of Promise
1st Edition
Edited
By Trevor Hart, Gavin Hopps
September 08, 2016
In hope, Christian faith reconfigures the shape of what is familiar in order to pattern the contours of God's promised future. In this process, the present is continuously re-shaped by ventures of hopeful and expectant living. In art, this same poetic interplay between past, present and future ...
Between the Image and the Word: Theological Engagements with Imagination, Language and Literature
1st Edition
By Trevor Hart
September 13, 2013
The central contention of Christian faith is that in the incarnation the eternal Word or Logos of God himself has taken flesh, so becoming for us the image of the invisible God. Our humanity itself is lived out in a constant to-ing and fro-ing between materiality and immateriality. Imagination, ...