Books in the Routledge Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts series

This book offers a critical edition of arguably the greatest work of English theology in the 20th century: Austin Farrer's Bampton Lectures published as The Glass of Vision in 1948. This critical edition also contains an introduction to the significance and context of Farrer's thought.

The imagination has been called the principal organ for knowing and responding to disclosures of transcendent truth. This book probes the theological sources of imagination, which make it a vital tool for knowing and responding. It approaches areas of theology and imagination through a focus on 19th-century theologian and writer George MacDonald.

Presenting an introductory chapter reflecting on the nature of artistic performance and its relationship to the notions of tradition and identity, this book attends to the phenomenon of dramatic performance and theological applications of it. It also considers various aspects of the performance of Christian identity, looking at worship, and more.

Contributes to the re-emerging field of 'theology through the arts' by proposing a way of approaching one of the most challenging theological concepts - divine timelessness - through the principle of construction of space in the icon.

A comprehensive study of the theological significance of Paul Claudel, a poet frequently cited by literary-minded theologians in Europe and theologically-minded poets (such as von Balthasar, de Lubac and Eliot). It illuminates how Claudel's synthesis of many dimensions remains an important way of practising poetry in the Christian tradition.

This book offers a critical edition of arguably the greatest work of English theology in the 20th century: Austin Farrer's Bampton Lectures published as The Glass of Vision in 1948. This critical edition also contains an introduction to the significance and context of Farrer's thought, and a selection of thirty-years' worth of commentary by leading British and European theologians and literary scholars: David Brown, Ingolf Dalferth, Hans Haugh, Douglas Hedley, David Jasper and Gerard Loughlin. Of interest to literary and biblical scholars, theologians, and philosophers, this book holds particular value to those exploring the nature of imagination in contemporary thought and scholarship.

Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts is the first study of its kind, containing essays that address Protestantism and the fine arts (visual art, music, literature, and architecture), and historical and contemporary Protestant theological perspectives on the subject of beauty and imagination.

Offering an imaginative approach through dialogue with theatrical theory and practice, Vander Lugt demonstrates a new way to integrate actor-oriented and action-oriented approaches to Christian ethics within a comprehensive theodramatic model. This book contains not only a fruitful exchange between theological ethics and theatre.

In Christian faith, the present is continuously re-shaped by ventures of hopeful and expectant living. In art, the poetic interplay between past, present and future takes specific concrete forms, furnishing vital resources for sustaining an imaginative ecology of hope. This volume attends to the contributions that architecture, drama.

The central contention of Christian faith is that in the incarnation the eternal Word or Logos of God himself has taken flesh, so becoming for us the image of the invisible God. Our humanity itself is lived out in a constant toing and froing between materiality and immateriality.

In the digital world, Kierkegaard's thought is valuable in thinking about aesthetics as a component of human development, both including but moving beyond the religious context as its primary center of meaning. Contributing to the debate about Kierkegaard's conception of the aesthetic.

Introducing the thought of philosopher and theologian Jean-Yves Lacoste, this book provides an overview spanning Lacoste's earliest works on sacramentality to his work "Etre en Danger" (2011) in which Lacoste opens up the liturgical experience onto a spiritual experience of life.

"Aesthetics" and "theological aesthetics" usually imply a focus on questions about the arts and how faith or religion relates to the arts. The focus of this text is instead on beauty. It explores whether Christian existence and the ethical exclude or require an aesthetic dimension in beauty.

Explores the variety of conversations between theology and tragedy. This title examines three main areas such as: theological readings of a range of tragic literature, from plays to novels and the Bible itself; how theologians have explored tragedy theologically; and, how theology can interact with various tragic theories.

Explores the richness of orthodox Christian tradition, both Western and Eastern, in matters of 'sacral aesthetics' - a term used to denote the foundations, production and experience of religiously relevant beauty, investigating five principal themes.

Taking seriously the practice and not just the theory of music, this ground-breaking collection of essays establishes a new standard for the interdisciplinary conversation between theology, musicology, and liturgical studies.

Explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times onwards, the author applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do theology'.