Mark McInroy is an assistant professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Thomas. He has published academic examinations of Origen of Alexandria, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is the author of Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Theology and the Arts: Engaging Faith arose through a chance meeting between the authors at the Oxford Round Table at Jesus College, Oxford. With common interests in the arts, ethics, and practical theology, Ruth Illman and W. Alan Smith offer their shared expertise in this volume in order to explicate the ways in which the arts can support the practicing of theology. Chapter 1 examines the effects of postmodern, feminist, and developing-world liberation theologies on the arts and aesthetic theory, and chapter 2 draws from Levinas, Buber, Gadamer and others to develop a practical theology of the arts. Chapter 3 brings the insights of the first two chapters to bear on an outline of key themes developed later in the book. Chapters 4 through 11 comprise the second section of the volume, in which a number of empirical studies examine the use of art in particular communities all over the world. The religious traditions and art forms investigated are equally varied, as the book treats of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze, and agnostic subjects, and literature, music, dance, film, theater and visual art are explored.
Oleg V. Bychkov and James Fodor, eds., Theological Aesthetics after von Balthasar (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008).
Theological Aesthetics after von Balthasar is published in Ashgate’s series, “Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts,” and it contains sixteen essays that collectively endeavor to offer a tribute to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s contribution to theological aesthetics, as well as to treat of the current state of the discipline. Fittingly, then, Part One of the volume treats of the legacy of von Balthasar (in two distinct sections), beginning in Section A (“The Trilogy”) with an essay from Francesca Aran Murphy, “Hans Urs von Balthasar: Beauty as a Gateway to Love,” and another by Ben Quash, “Hans Urs von Balthasar’s ‘Theater of the World’: The Aesthetic of a Dramatics.” Section B (“Retrieving the Past”) contains essays on Gadamer, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Hopkins by Daniel L. Tate, Günther Pöltner, Mary Beth Ingham, CSJ, and Bernadette Waterman Ward, respectively. Part Two, titled “Von Balthasar: Some Criticisms,” demonstrates that the volume is not purely adulatory in its engagement with Balthasar’s work. Fergus Kerr’s “Balthasar, Hopkins, and the ‘English Tradition’,” Lee Barrett’s “Von Balthasar and Protestant Aesthetics: A Mutually Corrective Conversation,” and George Pattison’s “Is the Time Right for a Theological Aesthetics?” call into question Balthasar’s reading of key figures in the tradition. Part three (“Outside von Balthasar: The Spectrum of a Theological Aesthetics”) reaches beyond Balthasar’s work in two separate sections. Section A (“General Perspectives”) conveys something of the current state of theological aesthetics by appealing to essays by four widely known authors: Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Viladesau, Frank Burch Brown, and Alejandro Garcia-Rivera. The volume ends with section B (“Specific Issues”) of part three, with contributions from James Fodor, Sigurd Bergmann, and Timothy Gorringe.
Christopher Irvine, The Cross and Creation in Christian Liturgy and Art (London: SPCK, 2013).
The Cross and Creation in Christian Liturgy and Art, authored by the Canon Librarian and Director of Education at Canterbury Cathedral, Christopher Irvine, aims to recover a way of viewing the material culture of Christianity such that connections between the cross and creation are seen anew. Particularly valuable for Irvine’s task is the Franciscan tradition of liturgy and art, in which an intrinsic connection exists between his two themes. Chapters 1 and 2 examine “seeing” in liturgical and soteriologically oriented ways, and chapter 3 treats of the cross “in blood and in bloom.” In chapter 4 the key link between the cross and creation is forged with Irvine’s naming the former “the noble tree.” In chapter 5, the living cross is examined, and in chapter 6 the tree of life emerges as the central theme. The final chapter, “Restoring Paradise,” develops the notion of the cross as a kind of “planting” that brings about a new world order.
Aidan Nichols, Redeeming Beauty: Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).
Aidan Nichols’s Redeeming Beauty examines Eastern and Western Christian theology in an effort at describing “sacral aesthetics,” or religiously relevant beauty. Nichols begins in Part One (“Foundations, in Creation and Grace”) by investigating aesthetics in Augustine and Aquinas, and he also treats of icons and Byzantine iconoclasm in their original historical context. Part Two moves to twentieth century “theologians of the image,” and it examines icons again, this time from the perspectives of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Sergei Bulgakov, and Benedict XVI. Part Three (“The Difficulties of Practice”) draws from French Dominicans Marie-Alain Couturier and Pie-Raymond Régamey, as well as English readers of Jacques Maritain (specifically, Eric Gill and David Jones), in order to address the problems encountered when one attempts to live out sacral aesthetics in an age dominated by secular—and frequently rather arcane—visual art.