Article
Book Reviews: Jokes Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, by Ted Cohen. University of Chicago Press, 99 pp. Two Jews on a Train: Stories from the Old Country and the New, By Adam Biro. University of Chicago Press, 128 pp. Laughter at the Foot of the Cross, by M. A Screech, Penguin, 328 pp. The only subjects worth …
Article
If someone were to tell me that it lay in my power to write a novel explaining every social question from a particular viewpoint that I believed to be the correct one, I still wouldn’t spend two hours on it. But if I were told that what I am writing will be read in twenty …
Article
Surveys show that 30 percent of Americans claim to be very interested in “learning more about spiritual direction,” and another 32 percent say they are fairly interested. People of all ages appear to be interested in spiritual direction, a fact that is notable since churchgoing, prayer and many other forms of religious participation draw more …
Article
The life of the artist offers many analogies to the life of faith. The strictness of his way of life, the combination of ascesis and joy, the law of incarnation which limits all false spirituality: such features of the artist’s calling carry both rebuke and instruction for the Christian, especially in a time when indulgence …
Article
. . . the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. . . Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. [Oscar Wilde, “The Decay …
Continue reading “Poetry of Religion on Broadway: ‘The Elephant Man’”
Article
The relationship between religion and the arts has long been one of theologian Joseph Sittler’s primary interests. This spring Augsburg is releasing a collection of Sittler’s recent short reflections on various topics, and we are here publishing some of those dealing with aesthetic concerns. From the forthcoming Gravity and Grace, copyright © 1986 Augsburg Publishing …
Article
This is the seventh in a series: New Turns in Religious Thought As I understand the aim of this series of articles, it is not an attempt to garner direct predictions from those who have been invited to participate. Rather, the purpose is to sketch out possible new directions in religious thought in an indirect …
Article
Evidence of a new interest in the arts on the part of the churches appears on all sides today. At the level of the local church we note exhibits of religious painting and sculpture, productions of modern plays like those of Eliot and Christopher Fry, as well as initiatives with respect to the dance and …
Article
A peculiarly western habit of thought is the notion we have inherited from the Greeks that we cannot understand objects, ideas, or observations until we have separated and classified them. This process of classification has enabled us to become extraordinarily successful in technological matters. In fact, it is the whole basis of scientific-technological work. On …
Article
Some years ago I encountered a young Jewish art historian who was doing his doctoral dissertation on the sculpture of the great 14th century Romanesque Church of Saint-Pierre at Aulney in France. We were both photographing the church in the golden light of a winter afternoon. It turned out that we shared an obsession. As …
Continue reading “The Creature’s Creation: Is Art ‘Helpful’ to Faith?”
Article
While seminaries and churches have shown a burgeoning interest in the arts, the academic study of religion and the arts has come under fire in some quarters. In 1990 the American Academy of Religion, the chief scholarly organization of college and university professors of religion, suspended its Arts, Literature and Religion section for a period …
Continue reading “The Crisis of Meaning in Religion and Art”
Article
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was the most influential visual artist of the 20th century. Whether he was also the greatest artist of the century can perhaps be disputed. However, having visited the huge exhibition “Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective,” which ran this summer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I would offer no argument …
Article
In last year’s election campaign we were reminded that images can overpower words. The U.S. military prohibited the taking of pictures of flag-draped coffins arriving from Iraq even as it freely shared statistics on the number of American dead. It knows that the images are more powerful than the numbers. Digital photographs from Abu Ghraib …
Continue reading “The Power of a Picture: How Protestants Imaged the Gospel”
Article
We live in a time of extraordinary self-consciousness in regard to the church. The issues of the wider society have catalyzed, polarized, and pulverized the rank and file and confused the chiefs. When Pope Paul appointed St. Therese to be a “doctor” of the church, he felt obliged specifically to disavow any connection with Women’s …
Continue reading “The Renewal of the Sense of Wonder in the Church”
Article
Bibles are cheap in their zeal to make scripture accessible to everyone. Protestants have manufactured Bibles in almost every language and made them available for startlingly small sums. Perhaps in doing so they have unwittingly made the Bible cheap not just financially, but theologically. Whereas Wycliffe and Tyndale devoted their lives to creating a Bible …
Article
There are signs that we are living in an intensely “religious” period. That is not to say that this is a time of ascendency of the classical Judeo-Christian western religious institutions, but rather that a vast new interest in and experimentation in a whole new range f religious options may be identified. Many of these …
Continue reading “The Uses of Imagination in Religious Experience”
Article
Ring Lardner, upon the occasion of his first visit to the Grand Canyon, remarked, “What a marvelous place to throw old razor blades.” He was not usually a disrespectful person. But the sight of that incredible canyon, with the amazing riot of color and space, so overwhelmed him that he could not find words to …
Article
Rembrandt’s Eyes By Simon Schama In this lavish new book, Simon Schama explores the boisterous, dynamic, capitalist society of 17th-century Holland through the eyes of the artist who, more than any other, has become synonymous with its vividly expressive pictorial culture. This biography of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) provides the pretext for a wide-ranging discussion …
