Religion as Art
Religion as Art

Author: Thomas R. Martland

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1982-06-30

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1438412134

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Religion in its most authentic part is an art form. Religion does what art does. This idea is richly illustrated and supported by materials of diverse origin. The vast range of the author's experience in the arts and in religious texts and works of aesthetics allows him to lay hold of a great mass of disparate material and to bring out new dimensions in all of it. He always has just the example he needs at his fingertips, a Tibetan Buddhist text next to a French impressionist painting and a remark about early Banogu counterpoint, and each example is seen in a new and interesting way. Through this gentle yoking together of heterogeneous materials, common roots are discovered. Most studies of art and religion describe and explain them as data. Thomas Martland identifies them as expressions of ideals and asks what they are when they are authentic rather than merely what they are when they are self-identified as art and religion. This is an identification through assessment, not an Aristotelian classification, and the means of assessment are provided.

Religion as Art Form
Religion as Art Form

Author: Carl L. Jech

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2013-05-09

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1620329107

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If you find books such as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion compelling but your faith heritage is also important to you, this book shows how you can affirm both. Taking a cue from Marcus Borg's contention that "scriptural literalism" is for many people a major impediment to authentic spirituality, Carl Jech describes how all religion can and should be much more explicit about its symbolic, metaphorical, and artistic nature. With a particular focus on mortality and the relationship of humans to eternity, the book affirms a postmodern understanding of "God" as ultimate eternal Mystery and of spirituality as an artistic, (w)holistic, visionary, and creative process of becoming at home in the universe as it really is with all its joys and sorrows. Religion as Art Form is a must-read for those who think of themselves as spiritual but not religious.

Philosophy, Art, and Religion
Philosophy, Art, and Religion

Author: Gordon Graham

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-09-07

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1107132223

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Systematically explores the affinity and the rivalry between art and religion, focusing at length on music, visual art, literature, and architecture in turn.

On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art

Author: James Elkins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-12-15

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1135879702

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Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? John Updike calls modern art "a religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life," but does that mean that contemporary art is spiritual? What might it mean to say that the art you make expresses your spiritual belief? On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art. This book will enable you to walk into a museum and talk about the spirituality that is or is not visible in the art you see.

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts
The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts

Author: Frank Burch Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 0190871199

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This volume offers 37 original essays from leading scholars on the crucial topics, issues, methods, and resources for studying and teaching religion and the arts.

Religion and Art
Religion and Art

Author: Richard Wagner

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1994-01-01

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9780803297647

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"One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion." With these words Richard Wagner began "Religion and Art" (1880), one of his most passionate essays. That passion made Wagner himself a central icon in the growing cult of art. Wagner felt that he lived in an age of spiritual crisis. "It can but rouse our apprehension, to see the progress of the art-of-war departing from the springs of moral force, and turning more and more to the mechanical," he wrote. In response to the frightening progress of dynamite and steel, Wagner adopted the role of the Tone Poet Seer, who reveals the inexpressible in concert halls and cleanses souls in waves of symhonic revelation. "Religion and Art" is the pivot of the works collected here. Also included are his defining essays "Public and Popularity" and "The Public in Time and Space"; his papers relating to the creation of the Bayreuth School; his complaint against publishers, "On Poetry and Composition" (1879); his article on the first production of Parsifal (1882); and other works that speak his mind about strengthening the spirit through music. These works participated in the duel between Wagner and Nietzsche that ensued after the breakup of their friendship in 1878. Nietzsche publicly called Wagner an incurable romantic, emphasizing how sick he thought both Wagner and his art were. Here Wagner counterattacks with arch innuendo and sarcasm. This edition includes the complete volume 6 of the 1897 translation of Wagner's works commissioned by the London Wagner Society. William Ashton Ellis is one of the most important translators of nineteenth-century musicology. In addition to his monumental translation of Wagner's prose works, he translated Wagner's correspondence with Franz Lizst, Mathilde Wesendonck, and Wagner's own family. Ellis died in 1919.

Art, Religion and Resistance in (Post-)Communist Romania
Art, Religion and Resistance in (Post-)Communist Romania

Author: Maria Alina Asavei

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-22

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 3030562557

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This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly, consumerist society and its global market. It investigates the critical, tactical and subversive employments of religious motifs and themes in contemporary art pieces that confront the religious ‘affair’ in post-communist Romania. In doing so, it addresses a key gap in previous scholarship, which has paid little attention to the relationship between religious art and political resistance in communist Central and South-East Europe.

Art and Faith
Art and Faith

Author: Makoto Fujimura

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 0300255934

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From a world-renowned painter, an exploration of creativity’s quintessential—and often overlooked—role in the spiritual life “Makoto Fujimura’s art and writings have been a true inspiration to me. In this luminous book, he addresses the question of art and faith and their reconciliation with a quiet and moving eloquence.”—Martin Scorsese “[An] elegant treatise . . . Fujimura’s sensitive, evocative theology will appeal to believers interested in the role religion can play in the creation of art.”—Publishers Weekly Conceived over thirty years of painting and creating in his studio, this book is Makoto Fujimura’s broad and deep exploration of creativity and the spiritual aspects of “making.” What he does in the studio is theological work as much as it is aesthetic work. In between pouring precious, pulverized minerals onto handmade paper to create the prismatic, refractive surfaces of his art, he comes into the quiet space in the studio, in a discipline of awareness, waiting, prayer, and praise. Ranging from the Bible to T. S. Eliot, and from Mark Rothko to Japanese Kintsugi technique, he shows how unless we are making something, we cannot know the depth of God’s being and God’s grace permeating our lives. This poignant and beautiful book offers the perspective of, in Christian Wiman’s words, “an accidental theologian,” one who comes to spiritual questions always through the prism of art.

Religion in the Art of Archaic and Classical Greece
Religion in the Art of Archaic and Classical Greece

Author: Tyler Jo Smith

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2021-06-18

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0812252810

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"An examination of the combined subjects of ancient Greek art and religion, dealing with festivals, performance, rites of passage, and the archaeology of death, to name a few examples, to explore the visual, material, and textual dimensions of ancient Greek religion"--

Rocks of Ages
Rocks of Ages

Author: Stephen Jay Gould

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2011-07-20

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0307801411

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"People of good will wish to see science and religion at peace. . . . I do not see how science and religion could be unified, or even synthesized, under any common scheme of explanation or analysis; but I also do not understand why the two enterprises should experience any conflict." So states internationally renowned evolutionist and bestselling author Stephen Jay Gould in the simple yet profound thesis of his brilliant new book. Writing with bracing intelligence and elegant clarity, Gould sheds new light on a dilemma that has plagued thinking people since the Renaissance. Instead of choosing between science and religion, Gould asks, why not opt for a golden mean that accords dignity and distinction to each realm? At the heart of Gould's penetrating argument is a lucid, contemporary principle he calls NOMA (for nonoverlapping magisteria)--a "blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution" that allows science and religion to coexist peacefully in a position of respectful noninterference. Science defines the natural world; religion, our moral world, in recognition of their separate spheres of influence. In elaborating and exploring this thought-provoking concept, Gould delves into the history of science, sketching affecting portraits of scientists and moral leaders wrestling with matters of faith and reason. Stories of seminal figures such as Galileo, Darwin, and Thomas Henry Huxley make vivid his argument that individuals and cultures must cultivate both a life of the spirit and a life of rational inquiry in order to experience the fullness of being human. In his bestselling books Wonderful Life, The Mismeasure of Man, and Questioning the Millennium, Gould has written on the abundance of marvels in human history and the natural world. In Rocks of Ages, Gould's passionate humanism, ethical discernment, and erudition are fused to create a dazzling gem of contemporary cultural philosophy. As the world's preeminent Darwinian theorist writes, "I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between . . . science and religion."