Cirocco, Josie My mini thesis of 'Finding God in Art: Karl Rahner on the Nature of Religious Art' was part of my master's project with the Flinders University, South Australia, completed in December 2014. With my research topic, 'Finding God in Art', in mind, I was seeking to go beyond the classical idea of sacred art to explore the way other art may genuinely be religious even though it is not overtly about a religious subject. To do this I adopted (...) some of the insights of Karl Rahner's theology. The immense success of Rahner's work is a tribute to his ability to speak profoundly about the everyday life of ordinary men and women. I explored Rahner's thought about art, both verbal and non-verbal, within a Christian context. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates Rancière’s understanding of the Heideggerean conception of art. It argues that Rancière is mistaken in categorizing Heidegger’s philosophy of art within the ethical regime of images, and further that his work corresponds with the central tenets of, and thus should be categorized within, the aesthetic regime of art. This is because art is understood as art, for Heidegger, when it instigates strife between world—the network of associations which constitute the horizons of a given population’s perceptual, conceptual and (...) motor possibilities—and earth—the necessarily resistant to explicit conscious acts and signification. Insofar as it is constituted by this dual relation, art puts forth a dialogically open space in which it paradoxically reinforces the boundaries of seeing, thinking and doing, yet remains heterogeneous to these modes, thereby preventing art from being reducible to the everyday. This paradoxical role, this articulation and reconfiguration that establishes a unified-character of the arts for Heidegger, performs a function that is best framed within the aesthetic redistribution-based transformative conception of art. This is because in both Heidegger and the aesthetic regime, the dialogically open space granted to art allows for cultural revolutions and paradigm shifts to take place in an indeterminable manner. (shrink)

In this book, Richard Viladesau contrues Christian theology as a "theological aesthetics". He examines Christian revelation and its presuppositions in relationship to three interconnected meanings of the "aesthetic" in modern thought: human cognition as feeling and imagination; the realm of the beautiful; and the arts. In each area, examples from the arts are correlated with classical and contemporary theological themes.

Seeing and hearing God in the Old Testament -- Seeing and hearing God in the New Testament -- Word and image in classical Greek philosophy -- Philosophers and sophists of the early Roman era -- Image, text and incarnation in the second century -- Image, text and incarnation in the third century -- Neoplatonism and the arts -- Image, text and incarnation in the fourth century -- Myth and text in proclus -- Christianity of Christian Platonism.

In one of his essays on art, Dutch author and essayist Joost Zwagerman reflects on the work of South African artist Marlene Dumas. Zwagerman addresses in particular Dumas' My Mother Before She Became My Mother, painted 3 years after her mother died. In his reflections, Zwagerman proposes an interpretation of Dumas' work. He suggests that Dumas, in her art, does not accept the omnipotence of death. Maybe against better judgement, but Dumas keeps creating images that not only illustrate the desire (...) for meaning but also embody this desire. The image and the desire for meaning merge in Dumas' paintings. The painting itself becomes an autonomous 'desire machine', according to Zwagerman. In this article, a theological reading of Zwagerman's own posthumously published volume of poetry, 'Wakend over God', is presented, with a specific interest in art, death and God. The sacramental hermeneutics of Richard Kearney and the theopoetics of John Caputo are brought into the conversation to elicit the dimensions of faith and religion in Zwagerman's own 'desire machine'. (shrink)

If he were alive today, what might Heidegger say about _Halo, _the popular video game franchise? What would Augustine think about _Assassin’s Creed _? What could Maimonides teach us about Nintendo’s eponymous hero, Mario? While some critics might dismiss such inquiries outright, protesting that these great thinkers would never concern themselves with a medium so crude and mindless as video games, it is impor­tant to recognize that games like these are, in fact, becoming the defining medium of our time. We (...) spend more time and money on video games than on books, television, or film, and any serious thinker of our age should be concerned with these games, what they are saying about us, and what we are learning from them. Yet video games still remain relatively unexplored by both scholars and pundits alike. Few have advanced beyond out­moded and futile attempts to tie gameplay to violent behavior. With this canard now thoroughly and repeatedly disproven, it is time to delve deeper. Just as the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan recently acquired fourteen games as part of its permanent collection, so too must we seek to add a serious consideration of virtual worlds to the pantheon of philoso-phical inquiry. In _God in the Machine, _author Liel Leibovitz leads a fas­cinating tour of the emerging virtual landscape and its many dazzling vistas from which we are offered new vantage points on age-old theological and philosophical questions. Free will vs. determinism, the importance of ritual, transcendence through mastery, notions of the self, justice and sin, life, death, and resurrection—these all come into play in the video games that some critics so easily write off as mind-numbing wastes of time. When one looks closely at how these games are designed, at their inherent logic, and at the cognitive effects they have on players, it becomes clear that playing these games creates a state of awareness vastly different from that which occurs when we watch television or read a book. Indeed, gameplay is a far more engaged process—one that draws on various faculties of mind and body to evoke sensa­tions that might more commonly be associated with religious experience. Getting swept away in an engrossing game can be a profoundly spiritual activity. It is not _to think_, but rather simply _to be_, a logic that sustained our ancestors for millennia as they looked heavenward for answers. Today, as more and more of us look screenward, it is important to investigate these games for their vast potential as fine instruments of moral training. Anyone seeking a concise and well-reasoned introduction to the subject would do well to start with _God in the Machine_. By illuminating both where video game storytelling is now and where it currently butts up against certain inherent limitations, Liebovitz intriguingly implies how the field and, in turn, our experiences might continue to evolve and advance in the coming years. (shrink)

In this paper I shall argue that useful correspondences can be drawn between the role of depiction in showing a view of the world and the realisation that would view God as a picture of experience in the world, since both can be seen to illustrate an art of interpretation. The perceptual insight that is gleaned in mystical-philosophical consciousness converges on the idea of a realm that is marked as divine, and by exploiting mental and linguistic imagery this mindful awareness (...) can be made concrete in the form of a written text, which can be seen to be analogous to a pictorial representation. The writer of a text purportedly sees and knows the domain of divine reality through sensible and conceptual means and then reduces this consciousness to a planar form, which is observable as an artistic rendering. The reader, who is at the same time a viewer, is invited to perceptually and imaginatively attend to the artifact as a manifestation of the experient's understanding of the functional nature of God, and in this apprehension of the divine scenario in the textual picture the interpretative motif of God-in-the-painting is revealed. (shrink)

The comparative analysis of the W. Golding’s novels demonstrates that the identification of God is the central problem in the works of the famous English writer. Golding did not consider Divinity only in connection with Christian orthodoxy, rational view of the world. In his novels, God gets different embodiments according to the wide cultural tradition. The group of heroes is trying to determine Divinity by force of the religious ritual in such fables as Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Rites (...) of Passage, Double Tongue, The Scorpion God. The writer was convinced that the base of any religion is violence and triumph of mass consciousness, it can lead to tyranny, totalitarian system. The heroes of novels Pincher Martin, Darkness Visible opposed God to the ego. To Cris and Sophy God became ‘the black lighting‘, the death, the damnation. By the example of their fates, Golding revealed the cult of self-will and individual freedom as the main problem of the contemporary society. Paths to God of Golding’s saints are different and profoundly individual, they are far away of any standards. They believe in spiritual foundation of the objective reality, they can reach the theophany and spread their consciousness to the compassion of other people. However, saints are exclusion, that is why the author’s viewpoint is conveyed by the spiritual searches of Jocelin, Talbolt, Arieka. Each of them had come up the hard way from proud self-assurance to doubting and searching the truth. Golding supposed that the man cannot touch the ground of Divinity, but his aspiration for God is the root of human and morality. The author saw God as spiritual foundation of the objective reality that is becoming acquainted due to intuition, individual spiritual search and creativity. (shrink)

In the traditional sense, a work of art creates an illustration of the outside world, or of a certain text or doctrine. Sometimes it is considered that such an illustration is not literal, but is an interpretation of what is visible, or an interpretation of a certain literary or ideological message. It can also be assumed that a work of art creates its own visual world, a separate story or a separate philosophical statement. The Parc de La Villette represents the (...) last of these possibilities: it is a philosophical statement that develops the premises derived from poststructuralist philosophies and the philosophy of deconstruction. The uniqueness of its being status, however, is that it does so not only at the level of the theoretical assumptions, but also through its functioning as an active philosophical work. This means that a park is a happening philosophy. Its activity, however, does not refer only to the present tense, but is also an attempt to penetrate the future, all otherness and impossibility. This kind of activity assumes that the work, in a sense, does not yet fully exist, but is also still produced in the processes of its interpretation. The theoretical foundations of the park included texts by Bernard Tschumi, in which he questioned traditional ways of creating a work of architecture, postulating in return the use of a long series of negations, which were comparable to the crisis of metaphysics characteristic of contemporary philosophy. It is therefore no coincidence that the publication containing Tschumi’s theoretical text on Parc de La Villette was accompanied by an essay by Jacques Derrida developing some of the architect’s concepts. The next step in integrating philosophy into the process of park design was a series of discussions between Peter Eisenman and Derrida, who completely moved the creation of the park into the world of thoughts, without accentuating the need for their realization in the material reality. The main topic of these discussions was the problem of the chôra, which was taken up by later commentators and used to interpret the park as a work in which the philosophy of the beginning is manifested relating to issues of politics, morality and religion. The park was therefore interpreted as a space of invention within the scope of creating new rules of functioning of the community and democracy. Thinking about the political future may, however, exceed the horizon of ordinary expectations. Although philosophical thought is always connected with contemporary problems and metaphysics sometimes intertwines with current politics, yet at the same time the customs of philosophy also include crossing horizons and thinking about absolute otherness and impossibility. Initially, the chôra, différance, Absolute Otherness (tout autre) and the Impossibile were concepts of pure philosophy of atheistic character, but with the further development of the discussion, more and more theological motifs began to emerge. One of the reasons for this phenomenon was the fact that radical negations of all being, which were contemplated in contemporary philosophy (by Heidegger and Derrida, among others), had previously been manifested in negative and apophatic theologies (by Master Eckhart, among others). Also the category of the “Other”, taken from Emmanuel Levinas, was clearly connected with the thought about God. A further reason for connecting the chôra with the theological thought was the interest in the philosophy of deconstruction expressed by some theologians. Caputo in particular managed to persuade Derrida to participate in discussions on the current status of religion. In the late period of Derrida’s writing, further statements on religious topics appeared. All these reasons led to posing a question about the identity of the chôra and God. Although there were no satisfactory conclusions on this issue, the discussion was also important to create an interpretation of the park as a place of worship. The chôra, representing, according to Plato, the preoriginal emptiness is the place of every beginning, but it turns out that it is not neutral to the being created in it. The chôra deposits itself in every being as an irremovable beginning that interferes with its stability. The chôra, therefore, forces us into a palintropical movement, but it also turns out to be a pure compulsion, an erring necessity and a fundamental force from which, in the human perception, motifs useful to the individual and to the community are extracted. All definitions of this force, including its anthropomorphisation, are formulated in such a way that they allow for building private and collective morality upon them. Such definitions are changed depending on variable political situations. It is difficult to determine whether in the processes of changes in the formulation of “God’s names” any essential value is retained, which is not subject to change. The current definitions of the chôra (God?), which can be found, for example, in the philosophy of Caputo, stress that she is a combination of various and contradictory forces. This characteristic inherits much of Plato’s concept, reminds us of Master Eckhart’s views on Gottheit and, at the same time, is not unfamiliar to Tschumi, whose essays were an apologia of contradictions. The current concept of chôra, transferred into the sphere of politics, is the praise of social diversity and the protection of the difference from the forces of order. In the Parc de La Villette, the future community and democracy were elevated as a system of safe existence of individuals in all their singularity. The park is a temple of a future community in which individual beings have nothing in common. (shrink)

Bringing together thinkers from philosophy of religion, religious studies, music, art, and film, while drawing on a wealth of phenomenological resources and methods, a team of renowned scholars provide new vantages on the question of how art is an expression of the human desire for God. In three interrelated parts, chapters employ phenomenological tools to propose new ways for speaking of the desire for God. Scholars first draw upon music, sculpture, film, and painting to develop ways of expressing diverse philosophical (...) and religious aspects characteristic of aesthetic experience. The discussion then opens up to examine the mystical and wounded aspects of embodied interface with God. The final part investigates embodied aesthetic praxis in philosophy of religion and religious studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Men Becoming Gods in "Style"Gioia and Girard on Divinized DesireJoshua Hren (bio)In our secular age we hear seekers of the sacred and religious devotees alike decry the soul-deadening, spirit-dumbing consequences of materialism. René Girard contends that—on the contrary—in the "leveled," horizontal world of a purportedly materialistic modernity this transcendent authority is deviated and distorted but it does not disappear. In his first major work, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, (...) he argues that "the passion that drives men to seize or gain more possessions is not materialistic; it is the triumph of the mediator, the god with the human face."1 In a materialistic age, the gods are "pulled down from the heaven, the sacred flows over the earth" and men become "gods for each other."2Dana Gioia, former businessman and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is no stranger to the economy of divinized desire. The stakes of our passions—whether we are wrecked by dubious wants or able to shed our infernal imitations—pierce his poetry. Gioia cites Girard as a significant influence alongside St. Augustine and Kierkegaard, though he does not indicate whether his own poetic investigations of mimesis are a direct yield of [End Page 149] his encounter with Girard or the independent discovery of attentive artistic intuition.3The refuge of lies so central to Girard is particularly palpable in Gioia's long narrative poem "Style."4 Charlie, the self-deprecating narrator, divinizes his college friend Tom, a business mogul who "prospered like one chosen by the gods."5 Tom uses his easy money to purchase gaudy metamorphoses, hosting magnificent events with his "flawless" wife Eden. An antihero of the unremarkable variety, Charlie attends all Tom's parties until he stops receiving invitations. When he discovers his deity's disappearance is tied to a terminal illness, he descends into the infernal "slums" of Tom's new hideout, and he finds his former hero hell-bent, ready to commit an arson that will erase his own existence in style. Charlie is confronted with a difficult decision that any coward would waver before. He has the chance to become an atheist—at least with respect to his dying god. After painting a portrait of man-made gods, the poem probes the question of whether and how we can cut short our penchant for great deceits.Charlie opens this narrative poem with an invective directed against himself.Just look at me. Isn't it obvious?I have no style. I'm just a human blur.On me expensive clothes look second-hand.They droop or sag. The color's never right.I wear the wrong apparel to the party.I pick the dullest item on the menu.Each haircut brings some new humiliation.6Crucially, we never receive an audit of this dour self-consciousness. By poem's end, no one has corrected or confirmed Charlie's condemnations. He may be right; his might be the antinomy of Midas's modus operandi. His hyperbolic portrait of Tom's greatness suggests that he is less than just to himself. His preoccupation with something as small as a menu item betrays a brutal obsessiveness. He employs the ascetical word "humiliation" in conjunction with a "haircut"—further revealing his unforgiving inner harshness. Charlie "always loved to visit Tom" precisely because he himself is Pathetic, Inc.7Were René Girard Charlie's older brother, he might sit the sad sap down on a comfortable couch and spell out the difficult truth as follows: The anti-hero "dreams of absorbing and assimilating his mediator's being."8 This highfalutin description of "the Other implies an insuperable revulsion for one's own substance."9 We ought not to take seriously the excuses these types give for their [End Page 150] failings and their fawning, for they "hate themselves on a more essential level than that of 'qualities.'"10 When Charlie disparages his badly cut bangs or his mismatched outfits, he's really incriminating his very being."The desire," Girard argues, "is aimed at the mediator's being."11 Charlie evinces this dynamic when he insists that Tom's "success was existential: / It wasn't what... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Another Look at Silence and Knowledge of God in Ignatius's Letter to the EphesiansRyan Patrick Budd"The man whose delight is in the Lord's teaching knows the art of sitting still in the right place."—Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical PoetryIn this essay, I attempt to supplement the better analyses of St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Ephesians (Ign. Eph.) 14.1 through 15.3 with structural insights. The main fruit (...) of the analysis will be to affirm the "mystical" meaning of Ignatius's concept of "hearing Christ's silence": the mature believer, who truly understands Christ's word, will be able to hear the silence of Christ—meaning, to understand Christ's hidden and mysterious Godhead—because Christ dwells within the believer as in a temple. The essay will proceed in three sections: First, a review of the more substantive commentaries on "silence" in Ign. Eph. 14–15; second, a presentation of a potential structure of the passage and a commentary on what that structure, if correct, would yield; and third, a very brief confirmation of the findings by reference to themes in St. Paul's own Epistle to the Ephesians.Scholarly Commentary on Ignatius and "Silence"In discussing Ign. Eph. 14–15, scholars have come to a wide variety of views, for almost as many reasons, as to what Ignatius means when he says the following: [End Page 451]It is better to be silent and to be, than to speak and not be. Teaching is good, if the one speaking should do. There is, then, one Teacher, who "spoke and it came to be," and even the things he has done silently are worthy of the Father. The one truly hearing the word of Jesus can also hear his [Jesus's] silence, that he might be fully made, that he might act through what he says and be understood through his (the believer's) silence.(15.1–2)1There are, however, two predominant camps into which one could group the different scholarly opinions: the first camp holds that Ignatius merely is speaking about integrity, the correspondence between words and deeds;2 the second camp holds that he is enunciating a kind of Christian mysticism.3 Two prominent members of the second camp, Virginia Corwin and Gregory Vall, though quite distinct in their views of the bishop of Antioch, provide reasoning that I find decisive in favor of recognizing that Ignatius—while certainly emphasizing a true correspondence between words and deeds—carries the point further than simple moralizing.Virginia Corwin's "Reserve of Deity" and the Believer's Knowledge of ChristCorwin, in her analysis of the passage, points toward a "reserve" existing "behind" the visible works of Christ, which is to be identified with his invisible, and thus "silent," Godhead, which one who truly hears his word can also "hear." She acknowledges, however, that Ignatius first recognizes Christ as an example of a truly effective teacher due to the absolute [End Page 452] correspondence between his words and his acts. She writes, "Christ... is a teacher unlike most, since there is no contrast at all between his profession and his actions.... He has an absolute clarity and a complete lack of any hypocrisy."4 The result of this recognition is not to stress ethical integrity, however important: it is to argue that, because of the correspondence between Christ's words and his silent acts and his even more silent person, the one who knows his words can come to a deep, profound, and infallible knowledge of who he is, himself.Corwin argues that there is something more about this Teacher than the mere—though impressive—integrity of his message:But it is not only the integrity of the teacher that distinguishes him, but his unique power: "He spoke and it came to pass"; at these words to the minds of both the writer and the hearers of the letter must have occurred the image of the mighty acts of creation.... It is precisely because the words of Jesus are in a sense mighty acts that they must be seen in the larger perspective.5Which "larger perspective" she means... (shrink)

Taking up the critique of theology found in the work of Heidegger, George Pattison argues for a model of thinking about God that would not be liable to the charge of `enframing' that Heidegger sees as characteristic of technological thinking. He constructs his case in relation to particular issues in bioethics, the place of theology in the university, the arts, and the contemporary experience of living in the city.

This paper explores the mystical structure of education as Bildung in medieval theologian and Dominican friar Meister Eckhart’s work and the 2010 French film Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et Des Dieux). I start this paper with a short introductory sketch of the Bildung tradition, in order to situate my discussion of Eckhart within the more well-known humanist tradition. Here, I claim that Bildung (as we understand it today through the classic Bildung philosophers) points back to its theological heritage (...) and horizon of meaning, when it is claimed as the general tekhnê (art, craft) of making oneself at home in the world with and through others. In my first step, I then explore the intellectual heritage of this mystical structure of Bildung. Drawing on a range of Meister Eckhart’s writings (esp. his German sermons), I elaborate three features pivotal to his concept of Bildung (as image-ing) of the imago Dei (image of God) in the human soul/action: (1) divine grace, (2) human cultivation and (3) the harmonisation of both in (what I shall call) ‘careful gestures'. In my concluding second step, I illustrate this mystical structure of Eckhartian Bildung—with a particular focus on the emergence of careful gestures—through the motion picture Des Hommes et Des Dieux. (shrink)

The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy shares with the thinkers of the ‘theological turn in phenomenology’ the programmatic desire to place the ‘theological’, in the broad sense of rethinking the religious traditions in our secular time, back on the agenda of critical thought. Like those advocating a theological turn in phenomenology, Nancy’s deconstructive approach to philosophical analysis aims to develop a new sensibility for the other, for transcendence, conceptualized as the non-apparent in the realm of appearing phenomena. This (...) is why Nancy launches a project looking for the ‘unthought’ and unexpected within the Christian traditions, called deconstruction of Christianity. However, the deconstructive approach to the non-apparent differs fundamentally from that of the thinkers of the turn (1) in its being non-apologetic and non-restorative with regard to religion, because it starts from a problematization of the—typically modern, that is romantic—desire to defend and protect what would be ‘lost’ and possibly to restore this, (2) in its focus on the complex difference-at-work (différance) between religion and secularism, a difference that can be termed entanglement and complicity between these two, (3) in its hypothesis that this entanglement is essentially one between (the meaning and experience of, the rituality around) presence and absence in modern culture, (4) in its conviction that the philosophy and history of culture must join, support, complete and maybe even turn around phenomenology when dealing with the difficult task of determining what exactly would be ‘left’ of the ‘theological’ in our time. In this article, both positions are compared and confronted further, leading to an account of Nancy’s re-readings of the Christian legacy (its theology, doctrine, art, rituals etc.), and ending in a more detailed, exemplary inquiry into the tension between distance and proximity, characteristic of the Christian God. (shrink)

Biblical scholars have given diverse explanations for the Lamb of God metaphor in John 1:29 and 1:36. Most scholars are of the opinion that ‘amnos’ refers to the Passover lamb. This explanation is not obvious from the context of the Fourth Gospel. To understand the metaphor ‘lamb’ or ‘amnos’ of God, one should understand the transferable meaning of the figure or image. In this comparison, only the vehicle, namely the lamb, is given. What and who the lamb is stays open. (...) It can be anything within the limits of the other story elements that have the same qualities as a lamb. To uncover the communicative dynamics of the metaphor, the exegete must have insight into the meaning and function of the original metaphor. Rhetoric provides a clue for the interpretation of the metaphor, namely that it is a Lamb of God. Within the pericope other rhetorical clues like antithesis and varietas are also provided. These clues are important but do not explain the image of the lamb. In this study, these problems will be considered via another medium, namely Hellenistic art and imagesand their penetration into Judaism and Christianity during the 1st century CE. Hellenistic and biblical images will be used to give an alternative interpretation of the metaphor of the Lamb of God. (shrink)

God is playful. Like a child building sand castles on the beach, God creates the world and destroys it again. God plays with his (or her) devotees, sometimes like a lover, sometimes like a mother with her children, sometimes like an actor in a play. The idea of God's playfulness has been elaborated in Hinduism more, perhaps, than any other religion, providing one of the most distinctive and charming aspects of Indian religious life. Lila or "divine play" can refer to (...) many things: to God's playful creation of the world and to religious dramas or "plays," as well as to various motifs in Hindu art. But despite the importance of lila in the cultural history of South Asia, few comprehensive studies of it are available, partly because scholars have tended to emphasize only one dimension of lila--either the theological or the performative--at the expense of the other. The Gods at Play fills this gap by bringing together scholarly essays on all aspects of this important Hindu idea, providing students with a broader understanding of popular Hindu culture and religion. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the critical interpretation of Greek art and religion provided by Hegel in the “Religion in the form of art” section of Chapter VII of his Phenomenology of the Spirit. The study will, thus, commence with an overview of the role played by art in the religion of ancient Greece, and then examine the reasons for the historical decline of this special phenomenon and the rise of Christianity, a religion referred to by Hegel (...) as a “visible religion” as it is required to “disclose” and manifest its contents: the spirit. Having focused special attention on the relationship between the people of ancient Greece and their gods and the role played by the concept of the ethical life, the paper will then proceed to investigate the relationship between the individual, the population and the ancient polis or Greek State as illustrated in the early works of Hegel and in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, in which Hegel develops his theory of ethical relations in ancient Greece as exemplified in the model of sibling relations within the family. The paper continues with an examination of Hegel’s criticism of Greek rituals and the inability of the modern world to understand such practices from the perspective of the life of the time, concluding, in line with Hegel, that our experience is now an external process as we no longer embrace the interiority of the ethical life of the past. Indeed, as Hegel considers the “spirit of destiny offered by those [ancient] works of art” to go beyond the ethical life of a nation, the fact that those works of art are no more considered useful and important is a tragic event, even though this destiny has shown us the spirit within them, and thanks to this tragic end, we have finally been able to reunite all the Greek gods in a single Pantheon in which “the spirit is conscious of itself as a spirit”. (shrink)

The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy shares with the thinkers of the ‘theological turn in phenomenology’ the programmatic desire to place the ‘theological’, in the broad sense of rethinking the religious traditions in our secular time, back on the agenda of critical thought. Like those advocating a theological turn in phenomenology, Nancy’s deconstructive approach to philosophical analysis aims to develop a new sensibility for the other, for transcendence, conceptualized as the non-apparent in the realm of appearing phenomena. This (...) is why Nancy launches a project looking for the ‘unthought’ and unexpected within the Christian traditions, called deconstruction of Christianity. However, the deconstructive approach to the non-apparent differs fundamentally from that of the thinkers of the turn (1) in its being non-apologetic and non-restorative with regard to religion, because it starts from a problematization of the—typically modern, that is romantic—desire to defend and protect what would be ‘lost’ and possibly to restore this, (2) in its focus on the complex difference-at-work (différance) between religion and secularism, a difference that can be termed entanglement and complicity between these two, (3) in its hypothesis that this entanglement is essentially one between (the meaning and experience of, the rituality around) presence and absence in modern culture, (4) in its conviction that the philosophy and history of culture must join, support, complete and maybe even turn around phenomenology when dealing with the difficult task of determining what exactly would be ‘left’ of the ‘theological’ in our time. In this article, both positions are compared and confronted further, leading to an account of Nancy’s re-readings of the Christian legacy (its theology, doctrine, art, rituals etc.), and ending in a more detailed, exemplary inquiry into the tension between distance and proximity, characteristic of the Christian God. (shrink)

The article presents a comparative analysis of the philosophical and aesthetic perspectives of English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Russian philosopher Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky on the issues of the theory of art and cognition. The study highlights the synergies and differences in their conceptions of art, music, imagination, and the interconnectedness of phenomena in the world, demonstrating how the philosophy of art serves as a key component in achieving a holistic understanding of human nature. The article explores Coleridge’s (...) concept of the organic unity of art as a living, evolving entity that transcends individual artistic disciplines. It delves into the poet’s views on the creative process and the role of imagination in shaping artistic expression, emphasizing the significance of his ideas for understanding the role of art in the human experience. Focusing on the unique aspects of Lossky’s philosophical ideas on art, the article argues that Lossky’s views on music are intrinsically linked to his philosophical doctrine of intuitivism. Intuitivism enables direct perception of an object by the knowing subject in its original form, rather than through a copy, symbol, or construction. Lossky’s doctrine distinguishes three modes of intuition (sensual, intellectual, and mystical) and acknowledges two realms: the world and the Superworld (the Kingdom of God). Sensual and intellectual intuition function within the world, while mystical intuition paves the way for a breakthrough into the Superworld (the Kingdom of God). The article demonstrates that music, as a fundamental component of Lossky’s philosophical doctrine, plays a crucial role in enabling a clearer vision of the object by the cognizing subject in its original form, as well as in the complete fulfillment of the missions designated for all three types of intuition. Music is a fundamental element of Lossky’s philosophical doctrine, where the indivisible unity of a musical tone’s properties serves as a symbol of the organic integrity of phenomena in the world. In conclusion, the article emphasizes that a deeper understanding of Coleridge’s and Lossky’s philosophical and aesthetic concepts can provide a transformative outlook on the philosophy of art, fostering interconnectedness among various realms of human creativity and strengthening the continuity of human culture while counteracting destructive forces in the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political CultureCynthia DamonHarriet I. Flower. The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. Studies in the History of Greece and Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xxiv + 400 pp. 75 black-and-white ills. 1 map. Cloth. $59.95.Despite its title, this book is not really about forgetting. Forgetting, as Tacitus knew to his cost, (...) cannot be done to order, whether the order be one's own or another's. Erasure, rather. Indeed erasures of a wide variety, from official memory sanctions mandating the removal of names from inscriptions and imagines from funerals, to spontaneous erasures on or of monuments associated with the disgraced, to literary attacks targeting posthumous reputations. The emphasis is on the first category; the book is structured around a chronological survey of official memory sanctions and the physical traces thereof from the early Republic [End Page 599] up to the first year of the principate of Antoninus Pius, but the other types are well integrated into the discussion. The Art of Forgetting is a fascinating study of the battle between the living and the dead or disgraced for prime turf in the memory space of the Roman elite.As with so much of Roman history as we can know it, the "memory wars" and "memory games" treated in this book are an elite phenomenon. The erasures discussed (and, happily, often pictured) here are most accessible to us when they are accomplished in the same enduring media to which the Roman elite entrusted its public record and reputation. The title of Flower's first chapter, "Clementis' Hat," alluding to the chance survival of a photographic testimonial for Czech politician Vladimir Clementis, captures Flower's early assertion that we can only know the incompletely successful erasures (12), but this seems to me to collapse an essential distinction, preserved elsewhere in the book, including its subtitle, between memory and reputation. The senate-mandated erasure of the man accused of Germanicus' murder is accomplished both by chiseling his name out of the dedication of a statue of Germanicus and by chiseling it into the empire-wide inscriptions on which the senate's verdict in his trial was recorded. The former deprives him of prime memory space; the latter assigns him space on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. Both oblivion and disgrace are weapons in the memory wars, and their relative salience varies.The chronological survey of the Roman evidence is preceded by a contextualizing chapter on memory sanctions in the Greek world, particularly in the Hellenistic world, in which Rome's elite saw first hand the battles over what went into the monumental record that followed (or even preceded) battles for territory. Early-attested sanctions such as the razing of a disgraced person's house seem to combine practical and symbolic ends: displacement of the individual and his immediate family and erasure of an avatar. The record of sanctions in democratic Athens, which adds to house-razing the expulsion of remains and the erection of stelai publicizing the names and crimes of offenders against the demos, already shows the complementary effects of oblivion and disgrace later exploited at Rome. A helpful distinction is drawn between amnesties such as that of 403 B.C.E. Athens, in which "a new start was made by promising not to use the past as a political weapon" (23), and the kind of memory politics manifested in sanctions. The discussion of the Hellenistic world establishes the connection, later relevant to the treatment of Rome's imperial women, between extravagant honors and harsh penalties in the symbolic realm: in the rhetoric of relations between cities and kings, for example, a ruler in favor is honored as a god, while a ruler out of favor may find his cult appropriated, his record erased, and his memory cursed.Rome had its own long-standing traditions of memory sanctions. Or at least by the Augustan age it felt it had. Chapter 3 tries to get back beyond the triumviral phase of Roman memory sanctions, citing fifth- and fourth-century house-razings for "citizen traitors" (45... (shrink)

What does theology have to do with art in this modern period? To make clear why art and religion can be related in a positive way, the question of why art is of value will be posed . Subsequently some examples will be critically discussed of how art and religion have been related in theological aesthetics . Finally, in dialogue with the positions discussed, I will develop my own approach to theological aesthetics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Between God and the President: Literature and Censorship in North AfricaHafid Gafaiti (bio)Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.—George Bernard ShawThose who fight with the pen will perish by the sword.—Slogan of the Algerian Muslim fundamentalistsIf you speak up, you die. If you don’t speak up, you die. So, speak up and die!—Tahar Djaout, the first writer assassinated in the context of the current Algerian political crisisIn the West, (...) censorship has been understood for the most part as the state’s control over cultural production. Many critics in the postwar period, however, have argued that other forms of censorship, such as market censorship, are comparable to the actions of the state. The Christian right’s attacks on art in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s together with Congressional moves to disempower and dismantle the NEA have generated a new set of debates about censorship in this country. It was understood that the extreme right sought to repress cultural productions carrying a message of ethnic and sexual difference, targeting the works by rappers, the photographer Mapplethorpe, Madonna’s music videos, and so on. The right provided rhetoric to support the privatization of public space, the control of language and public images, and the promotion of “safe” art.While many critics refer to this as the “new censorship,” structurally it is exactly the same as the “old” censorship, that is, state control intervening in the liberal subject’s absolute right to free expression. It appears that the dichotomy between the left’s claim for the absolute freedom of the artist and the right’s attempt to repress it is most often conceived in moral terms and is paradigmatic of the Western liberal oppositional categories used to describe censorship.This position views the relationship between art and censorship as either a bourgeois romantic opposition to political order or a corrupt collaboration by opportunistic apparatchiks. It leaves no room for what Michael Holquist, for example, calls “negotiation.” Moreover, it does not take into account the fact that—in Third World or socialist contexts, for example—the way certain intellectuals view their role vis-à-vis the state, society, and/or the people determines their degree of cooperation with censorship mechanisms.The problem with this Manichean vision is that it implies a notion of censorship that is ahistorical: it posits that there is an essential distinction between the censor and the [End Page 59] creator or free mind. On the one hand, as Miklos Haraszti accurately outlines, at least until very recently in the Eastern European context:Censorship is no longer a matter of simple state intervention. A new aesthetic culture has emerged in which censors and artists alike are entangled in a mutual embrace. Nor is it as distasteful as traditional critics of censorship imagine. The state is able to domesticate the artist because the artist has already made the state his home.[5]On the other hand, as Richard Burt rightly suggests:What counts as censorship is not always clear. Indeed, it is hard to see how one could call many contemporary cases censorship without either seriously distorting the traditional understanding of the term or redefining it to include so many practices—ranging from institutional regulation of free expression, market censorship, cutbacks in government funding for controversial art, boycotts, lawsuits, and marginalization and exclusion of artists based on their gender or race to “political correctness” in the university and the media—that the term is overwhelmed, even trivialized, its usefulness as a tool of cultural criticism called into question.[xiii]Recent events, not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world such as Algeria, the case on which I will concentrate, show that one cannot seriously conceive the question of censorship along the lines of closed, distinct, conceptual categories expressing absolute oppositions. In other words, it is necessary to take the concept of censorship out of the realm of morality and locate it in the world of history, to displace it from the framework of philosophy and move it to the context of culture.In this essay, I will analyze the exercise of censorship in Algeria in... (shrink)

The algorithmic turn in photography raises the question of whether an algorithmically generated image is even a photograph at all. This paradox is abundant on India's urban streets, where the pedestrian or road user is met with giant photo saturated flex hoardings printed with political and community messages and photo-shopped portraits of gods, chief ministers and party workers. In this article, attention to photo-based political posters alongside art practices sharing common elements of digital capture and postproduction contextualizes a reading of (...) technologically produced visual landscapes in the South Indian city of Bangalore. Informed by Vilèm Flusser, the techno-materiality of hoardings are interpreted as visual practices whose reliance on Microsoft and Adobe softwares reveal more than the semiotic information that is ostensibly transmitted; in so doing the extent to which photography is a useful entry point for assessing the visuality in which we're currently living and how this gets locally inflected in the case of India is explored. (shrink)

Herder already very early in his career, in the 1760s, established two vitally important and epoch-making principles in the philosophy of language: that thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language; and that meanings or concepts should be identified - not with such items as the referents involved, Platonic forms, or empiricist 'ideas' - but with word-usages. What did Herder do for an encore? His Treatise on the Origin of Language from 1772 might seem the natural place to look (...) for an answer to this question (since it is his best known work in the philosophy of language by far), but it is really the wrong place to look, because it temporarily regresses to a more conventional and less philosophically interesting position. However, Herder did succeed in making impressive progress in a broader array of works, namely by striving to identify prima facie problem cases confronting his two principles and to reconcile them with the latter. The main ones which he identified were God, animals, and non-linguistic art. In each of these cases, having initially proposed a reconciliation which did not work, he went on to develop a much more plausible one, indeed one which (at least in the two cases that really require one: animals and non-linguistic art) seems broadly correct. (shrink)

God Matters is a state-of-the-art, accessible anthology of the major issues in philosophy of religion. Its accessibility is due to its mix of classic readings and brand new readings about contemporary issues, commissioned specifically with an undergraduate student in mind. These commissioned readings make the difficult concepts of contemporary philosophy of religion easy to understand, and are complemented by key excerpts from more technical philosophers' writing on the same subjects. The result is an engaging, comprehensive reader that introduces students to (...) the most important ideas in classical and contemporary philosophy of religion, to the most important thinkers, and even to excerpts from the key texts in which these thinkers presented their groundbreaking theories. (shrink)

This article is transdisciplinary in that it touches on the disciplines of both mathematics and theology. It is about the mysterious link between truth and beauty in mathematics. It uses the theological pattern laid by the practical theologian Bohren in his book, God’s Becoming Beautiful. Mathematics can be seen as science or art. I argue that in both cases, we could conclude that God becomes beautiful in mathematics. This leads to the observation that there is some spirituality in mathematics. This (...) insight might also have practical implications for mathematics education in schools. (shrink)

The article investigates the hypothesis that preaching implies more than merely verbalising, proclaiming and rhetoric reasoning. Preaching is fundamentally the art of poetic seeing; an aesthetic event on an ontic and spiritual level; that is, it provides vocabulary and images in order to help people to discover meaning in life (preaching as the art of foolishness). In this regard, preaching should provide God-images that open up the dimension of aesthetics and provide vistas of the ‘unseen’. The iconic dimension of preaching (...) is about symbols and metaphors that help people to ‘see’ in everyday life (a poetic gaze) the presence of God in such a way that tragic events, the awareness of death and the anguish about the fear for loss and rejection become events for signifying life and for healing (the quest for wholeness). It is argued that practical theology should be about a liturgy of life. In this regard, the ‘ugliness of God’ becomes an aesthetic category in a Christian spiritual approach to iconography. In order to do this a critical approach to praxis thinking should probe into the realm of paradigms, especially paradigms that describe the ‘power of God’. Due to the assumption that the depiction of God’s power was predominantly influenced by the Serapis, Zeus and Roman cult (Emperor mystique), a paradigm shift from omni-categories (pantokrator) to bowel categories (passio Dei) in the homiletic depiction of God is proposed. (shrink)

The article re-visits the different scholarly approaches to Hegel's end-of-art scenario, and then proposes a new reading whereby ending and finitude are presented as essential features of beautiful art. The first and most determinant of art's endings is the death of the Christly art object, not representations of Christ, but the actual death of (the son of) God himself as the last classical artwork. The death of God represents the last word in Greco-Roman art, the accomplishment of the beautiful individuality (...) and its failure to present the Absolute in a singular, naturally infected, lively, human (made) form. The ending of art brings about a new form of the sacred: the representational language of revelatory religion. The ongoing production of modern artistic forms is a feature of actuality ("Wirklichkeit") and as such is condemned to an infinite approximation of what has been. Such actuality nonetheless "ends" in the ironic discourse of contemporary artistic expression, which Hegel qualifies as a "Vereitelung". The final realization of the beautiful art form, as a human-informed singularity embodying absolute content, may well be the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, whose performative iteration takes place in the form of "worship" practiced in the modern, state university. (shrink)

This paper looks at the phenomenon of theopoetic art. The word theopoetic dates back to the Patristic authors—referring to the making divine of the human and the making human of the divine—and has been radically revived as part of the recent religious turn in continental phenomenology and hermeneutics. Looking at an example of religious art, Andrei Rublev’s Trinity, the author traces the development of the idea of “God making” from Jewish and Christian literature to contemporary debates on the relationship between (...) the secular and the sacred. (shrink)

This ran against all that Robinson believed most deeply about belief in God- influenced as he was by the new wave of German the.

When Kent Nerburn received a letter from a young woman questioning her calling to spend her life in the arts, the writer and artist was struck by how closely her questions mirrored the doubts and yearnings of his own youth. Nerburn resolved that he would write his own letter: a letter of welcome and encouragement to all artists setting out on the same strange and magical journey, sharing the wisdom of a life spent working in the arts. From struggles with (...) money and the bitterness of rejection, to spiritual questions of inspiration and authenticity, Dancing With the Gods offers insight, solace and courage to help artists on the winding road to artistic fulfilment. Tender and joyous, it is a celebration of art's power to transform the darkest of human experience and give voice to the grandest of human hopes. (shrink)

For too long certain scholars have been content to portray Irenaeus of Lyons as a well-meaning churchman but incompetent theologian. By offering a careful reading of Irenaeus' polemical and constructive arguments, Briggman contradicts these claims by showing that he was highly educated, trained in the rhetorical arts, aware of general philosophical positions, and able to use both rhetorical and philosophical theories and methods in his argumentation. It is the first book to study both Irenaeus' conceptions of God and the person (...) of Christ. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Love centers Zora Neale Hurston's art and her life. Her most celebrated novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and her sharply criticized autobiography, Dust Tracks on A Road, explore the beauty and difficulties of love for women in the early twentieth century. Janie in Their Eyes was forced to choose between love and freedom to be herself. For Hurston, passionate love for one man competed with her deep desire for a career as a writer and playwright. In all instances, (...) self-fulfillment won out over love. (shrink)

In this paper, the concept of liquidation from the chapter on Self-consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is reconstructed and then used to deconstruct the systematic transition from sculpture to painting in the passage on the “System of the individual arts” in G.W.F. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. The aim is to show that such a deconstructed version of Hegel’s art philosophy provides a valid conceptual framework for the analysis of modern, particularly postmodern and contemporary art, which results as (...) liquid or liquidated art. Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God is discussed as major evidence for the concomitant neo-Hegelian claim that modern art has discursive reflection as its necessary supplement. (shrink)

Citation:Christodoulou, Marina. “Technopolis as the Technologised Kingdom of God. Fun as Technology, Technology as Religion in the 21st Century. God sive Fun.” Cahiers d'études germaniques N° 74, 2018. La religion au XXIe siècle - Perpectives et enjeux de la discussion autour d'une société post-séculière. Études reunites par Sébastian Hüsch et Max Marcuzzi, 119-132. -/- -------- -/- Neil Postman starts his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993)1 with a quote from Paul Goodman’s New Reformation: “Whether or not it (...) draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.” (Postman 1993: motto; Goodman 2010: 40). I would extend Postman’s Technopoly to Technopolis, to give it more of a presence in time and space. Hence, I will use the term Technopoly when I am referring to Postman; the term Technopolis is my own. -/- In his book From Faith to Fun: The Secularisation of Humour, Russel Heddendorf argues that humour is a technology (Heddendorf 2009: 32-34), as it is understood and theorized by Neil Postman in Technopoly. Russel Heddendorf also argues that “Technopoly” is a term correlated with Wittgenstein’s use of the term “worldview” (Weltanschauung) (Heddendorf 2009: 11). -/- I would like to draw on these thoughts to propose that Technopoly (or Technopolis) could be the secularized Kingdom of God, namely that Technology is the Religion of the 21st century, and that Fun is a paradigm of such a Technology / Technique. God is yet another technique or Technology of and in Technopoly. -/- The godless individual in the 21st century, I will argue, is as much a believer as the faithful in the Sacred Religion (term used in opposition to Secular or rather Technological or Technologized Religion, which is Fun). He believes in Fun (as a post-modern form of pleasure), as much as the believer believes, or more accurately, believed in God. In the 21st century, the faithful in Sacred Religion believes in a fun God, as opposed to the serious God of the past. Fun is turning into the Technologized Religion for all; for the faithful in Godly / Sacred Religion, as well for as the unfaithful. Fun (pleasure, humour) is the definitive qualia of 21st century pleasure. The mechanics of Fun make it absolutely functional for controlling people; as Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World, people “are controlled by inflicting pleasure” (cited in Heddendorf 2009: 158). Now, indulging in pleasure is having Fun. In the 21st century, nobody is unfaithful, nobody disputes God, because God has been manufactured into Fun. We are living in the most religious century of all. -/- The commodity of God, now inextricably blended into work and leisure ethics and culture, is as unavoidable as survival. You don’t work, you don’t survive, you don’t exist. You work, you are entitled to leisure, or free time – the time (“busy-time”) when you are busy is work. The free time of leisure (“fun-time”) is a time for fun (pleasure). The time dedicated to Fun is culturally (capitalistically) pre-defined; no moment is actually free, each moment that is sold as free is to be bought with Work Time tokens –which is money. Believe is Enjoy. Happiness, achieved through pleasure, and pleasure through Fun, and Life as Play, is the recipe for Teleology in the 21st century. -/- The Technological God (Fun), as the Sacred God before him, is sovereignty’s technique or a social “mode of release”: demonstrations, marches, petitions, freedom of speech, citizen and human rights vindications, are “modes of release”, so that the next day, feeling relieved and released that you are working for a better life and a better world, you can wake up cheerfully to walk to your workplace, feeling it will change because of your marching, or your petition, or your speech, or the mass you attended, or the prayer you said yesterday. Thus life continues unchanging, through postponing hope; the tension of the tragedy is always released (lysis) in catharsis: refreshment for the next day of work. Art, especially cinema, (namely, simulated life) follows the same cathartic principles as real life. Thus, you can keep coping, and hoping in the meantime is of much help. Religion, Art, Science, Therapy, and Technology are all technologies used to market life, sell it or lend it, and humans are buying it back. Fun is free to produce, and expensive to buy. (shrink)

Is the Universe on our side? "My own investigations over a period of many years have given me a quiet assurance that there is a God who has given us sufficient clues in life, nature, human thought, beauty and art to satisfy the genuine inquirer that he exists, and that he has expressed himself most meaningfully in Jesus Christ. However, you may come to a different conclusion at the end of this book and that is your right as a thinking (...) responsible person. All I can do is to invite you to join me in looking at the arguments again..." Writing in a popular style but with careful reasoning, George Carey explains the traditional message of Christianity in its stark confrontation with modern unbelief and indifference. Here is a brief, aggressive, but always warm and generous appeal to faith for modern readers. (shrink)

This essay argues that martial arts, especially Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ), mediate the divine attributes of beauty, goodness, and truth just as much as the fine arts. Some may question the compatibility of martial arts with Christianity. Yet, according to the just war doctrine, fighting is permissible when defending oneself and others. Furthermore, instead of doing nothing about evil or injustice (pacifism) and escalating to violent killing, jiu-jitsu as a distinctive martial arts presents the creative alternative of nonviolence. The essay considers (...) various ways in which martial arts point to God through the analogy of being and the Tao. Jiu-jitsu resonates with Christian notions of perichoresis, self-awareness, rightness, flow, mystery, theosis, and epektasis. BJJ is beautiful in how it inspires existential wonder at the unique and particular gifts of the other. It searches for truth pragmatically and ethically, in a quest for combat effectiveness and social sustainability. Jiu-jitsu is good as it fosters inclusivity, respect, selflessness, and philanthropy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:164 BOOK REVIEWS "was presented with wine in the name of the whole University." That evening, one of the feasters recalled that this was the man who had written the foremost theological defense of the Royal Supremacy: the following morning, when Gardiner asked for vessels and vestments to say Mass before proceeding on his way, they were refused him, as to an excommunicate or a schismatic. This incident is (...) significant for a number of reasons: it shows that, whatever anyone else might have thought, Gardiner certainly thought he was a Catholic. The ambiguity of that label, and how far exactly it extended, is also quite evident. Some explanation of the difficulty and some consistency of usage in the text of the biography would have been welcome. The text itself appears to have a number of editorial flaws: p. 201 begins in the middle of a paragraph, and the opening lines are omitted. In the second paragraph of p. 176, numbers are transposed so that what is printed as 1534 should read 1543 (in the context, a significant difference). The book is, on the whole, a contribution to scholarship that is long overdue. That a man who was so powerful (not to say feared) during his own lifetime should wallow in oblivion is confusing. Redworth 's biography, for all its incompleteness, is of great value in piecing together the life of this leader, both political and ecclesiastical, who sought to fashion the emerging English Church and nation into a recognizably Catholic form. Dominican House of Studie$ Washington, D.C. W. BECKET SOULE, 0.P. Art and the Word of God (Arte e la Parola di Dio): A Study of Angelico Rinaldo Zarlenga, O.P. Edited by VINCENT I. ZARLENGA, O.P. (text in English and Italian). River Forest, Illinois: Fra Angelico Art Foundation, 1990. Pp. xiv + 109. The religious order of the Dominicans (Order of Preachers) was founded in the thirteenth century by St. Dominic with the specific purpose of preaching the Gospel or " ministry of the Word." With the Franciscan Order it shared in the creative, artistic impulse that produced the medieval cathedrals. It is often said that the great Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, for all its intellectual rigor, is also a work of art comparable to the gothic masterpiece of Chartres cathedral. Dominicans and Franciscans thought that the Gospel should find expression not only in words, but in poetry, music, architecture, and BOOK REVIEWS 165 the plastic arts. Among the artists who were members of the Dominican Order are the recently beatified Fra Angelico (BL Giovanni da Fiesole ), Bartolommeo della Porta, an important influence on Raphael and other High Renaissance painters, Juan Mayno the gifted Spanish contemporary of El Greco, Pere Couturier, the advocate of modern church art and friend of Matisse, and the American sculptor, Thomas McGlynn. Carrying on this Dominican tradition, Angelico Rinaldo Zarlenga (1919-1986), a native of Italy, worked in the United States from 1949 until his death. The present work, edited by his brother Vincent, also a member of the Order, makes available a chronological catalogue of his paintings, sculptures, and designs in glass, with many illustrations in full color, along with a biography and critical appreciations by others, including Cardinals Joseph Bernadin and Mario Luigi Ciappi. It is an important contribution to the history of Catholic religious art in the United States. The noted German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar built his whole theology not on the goodness and truth of God, but on His beauty, or in biblical terms, God's "glory." According to St. Thomas Aquinas, " beauty " is the " radiance of truth," that is, it is truth as truth is related well to our knowing powers. Like the fit between the key and the lock, beauty is the fit between known and the knower. That is why a landscape on a cloudy day looks dull and uninteresting, but when the sun comes out it appears strikingly beautiful. The sun's illumination has made the dim objects vividly visible, radiant to our eyes. This is what the artist does for us. He does not clothe the facts of reality with an adventitious beauty, but he illumines those facts so that... (shrink)

Religion is undergoing a transformation in current Western society. In addition to organized religions, there is a notable movement towards spirituality that is not associated with any institutions but in which experiences and notions of transcendence are still important. Transcendence can be described as God, the absolute, Mystery, the Other, the other as alterity, depending on one's worldview. In this book, these shifts in the views of transcendence in various areas of culture such as philosophy, theology, art, and politics are (...) explored on the basis of a fourfold heuristic model (proposed by Wessel Stoker)"--Back cover. (shrink)