Art and the Religious Impulse PDF Download

Author: Eric Michael Mazur
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838755341
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This collection explores the relationship between religion and the arts and challenges presumptions held in society about these two fields. Topics covered include church architecture, folk art, nineteenth-century classical music, contemporary fiction, recent film, performance art, and the battles over public funding of the arts.

Author: Rudolf Steiner
Publisher: Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner
ISBN: 9780880106276
Category : Anthroposophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Rudolf Steiner understood that the history of art is a field in which the evolution of consciousness is symptomatically and transparently revealed. This informal sequence of thirteen lectures was given during the darkest hours of World War I. It was a moment when the negative consequences of what he called the age of the consciousness soul, which began around 1417, were made most terribly apparent. In these lectures he sought to provide an antidote to pessimism. After describing the movement of consciousness from Greece into Rome, coupled with influences from the Orthodox East, he showed how these influences transformed as the Middle Ages became the Renaissance. The process that begins with Cimabue and Giotto develops, deepens, and becomes more conscious in the great Renaissance masters Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Then this movement continues with the Northern masters, D rer and Holbein, as well as the German tradition. One entire lecture is devoted to Rembrandt, followed by one on Dutch and Flemish paintings. Themes are woven together to show how past epochs of consciousness and art live again in our consciousness-soul period. Replete with interesting information and more than 600 color and black-and-white images, these lectures are rich and dense with ideas, enabling us to understand both the art of the Renaissance and the transformation of consciousness it announced. These lectures demonstrate (to paraphrase Shelley) that artists truly are the unacknowledged legislators of the age.

Author: Jonathan A. Anderson
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830899979
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In 1970, Hans Rookmaaker published Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, a groundbreaking work that considered the role of the Christian artist in society. This volume responds to his work by bringing together a practicing artist and a theologian, who argue that modernist art is underwritten by deeply religious concerns.

Author: Hendrik Roelof Rookmaaker
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 9780891077992
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Uses popular and lesser-known paintings to show modern art's reflection of a dying culture and how Christian attitudes can create hope in today's society.

Author: David Morgan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190272112
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Images can be studied in many ways--as symbols, displays of artistic genius, adjuncts to texts, or naturally occurring phenomena like reflections and dreams. Each of these approaches is justified by the nature of the image in question as well as the way viewers engage with it. But images are often something more when they perform in ways that exhibit a capacity to act independent of human will. Images come alive--they move us to action, calm us, reveal the power of the divine, change the world around us. In these instances, we need an alternative model for exploring what is at work, one that recognizes the presence of images as objects that act on us. Building on his previous innovative work in visual and religious studies, David Morgan creates a new framework for understanding how the human mind can be enchanted by images in Images at Work. In carefully crafted arguments, Morgan proposes that images are special kinds of objects, fashioned and recognized by human beings for their capacity to engage us. From there, he demonstrates that enchantment, as described, is not a violation of cosmic order, but a very natural way that the mind animates the world around it. His groundbreaking study outlines the deeply embodied process by which humans create culture by endowing places, things, and images with power and agency. These various agents--human and non-human, material, geographic, and spiritual--become nodes in the web of relationships, thus giving meaning to images and to human life. Marrying network theory with cutting-edge work in visual studies, and connecting the visual and bodily technologies employed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to secular icons like Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, and Mao, Images at Work will be transformative for those curious about why images seem to have a power of us in ways we can't always describe.

Author: Scott Calhoun
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350032565
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
U2 and the Religious Impulse examines indications in U2's music and performances that the band work at conscious and subconscious levels as artists who focus on matters of the spirit, religious traditions, and a life guided by both belief and doubt. U2 is known for a career of stirring songs, landmark performances and for its interest in connecting with fans to reach a higher power to accomplish greater purposes. Its success as a rock band is unparalleled in the history of rock 'n' roll's greatest acts. In addition to all the thrills one would expect from entertainers at this level, U2 surprises many listeners who examine its lyrics and concert themes by having a depth of interest in matters of human existence more typically found in literature, philosophy and theology. The multi-disciplinary perspectives presented here account for the durability of U2's art and offer informed explanations as to why many fans of popular music who seek a connection with a higher power find U2 to be a kindred spirit. This study will be of interest to scholars and students of religious studies and musicology, interested in religion and popular music, as well as religion and popular culture more broadly.

Author: Sage Elwell
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004447598
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 115

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Book Description
This concise volume offers an introduction to religion and the digital arts that is thematically organized around traditional religious categories such as ritual and myth paired with corresponding digital categories such as code and avatars.

Author: Thomas E. Crow
Publisher: Power Publications, Sydney
ISBN: 9780909952990
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first in the new Power Polemics series, Thomas Crow's No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art turns away from contemporary cultural theories to face a pervading blindspot in today's art-historical inquiry: religion. Crow pursues a perhaps unpopular notion of Christianity's continued presence in modern abstract art and in the process makes a case for art's own terrain of theology: one that eschews idolatry by means of abstraction. Tracking the original anti-idolatry controversy of the Jansenists, anchored in a humble still life by Chardin, No Idols sets the scene for the development of an art of reflection rather than representation, and divinity without doctrine. Crow's reinstatement of the metaphysical is made through the work of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon and American artists Mark Rothko, Robert Smithson, James Turrell, and Sister Mary Corita Kent. While a tightly selected group of artists, in their collective statute the author explores the proposal that spiritual art, as opposed to "a simulacrum of one," is conceivable for our own time.

Author: Gregory Wolfe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781941106068
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith, and Mystery is a collection of essays, written over nearly three decades, by the founder and editor of Image journal, Gregory Wolfe.

Author: Timothy Gorringe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300162806
Category : Art, European
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This stimulating book argues that great art can function as a "secular parable"--that is, like the parables of Jesus, art can lead viewers to reflect on the reality and presence of God in the world. T. J. Gorringe examines representative secular paintings of the most significant types (mythological themes, genre painting, portraiture, landscape, still life, abstract art), showing how each type can point toward God, whether by envisaging an alternative future, creating aesthetic delight, or teaching us to see things differently. His provocative study challenges the notion that art since the 15th century has become increasingly secularized. Gorringe gives careful consideration to each work's historical background and artistic context, as well as to art historical and critical appraisals. With an ecumenical approach, he then provides an insightful argument for how each piece can be read theologically. Although readers may sometimes disagree with his theological stance or his interpretation of specific works, his engaging commentary provokes reflection and challenges deeper questioning and awareness.