This book explores the historical and contemporary relationship between the arts and Christianity.

Tradition and Transformation in Christian Art approaches tradition and transculturality in religious art from an Orthodox perspective that defines tradition as a dynamic field of exchanges and synergies between iconographic types and their variants. Relying on a new ontology of iconographic types, it explores one of the most significant ascetical and eschatological Christian images, the King of Glory (Man of Sorrows). This icon of the dead-living Christ originated in Byzantium, migrated west, and was promoted in the New World by Franciscan and Dominican missions. Themes include tensions between Byzantine and Latin spiritualities of penance and salvation, the participation of the body and gender in deification, and the theological plasticity of the Christian imaginary. Primitivist tendencies in Christian eschatology and modernism place avant-garde interest in New Mexican santos and Greek icons in tradition.

Art and the Roman Viewer presents a fresh analysis of a major intellectual problem in the history of art: why did the arts of Late Antiquity move away from classical naturalism towards spiritual abstraction? Arguing from a close examination of ancient art images and texts, Jas Elsner shows how an understanding of Roman viewing practices greatly deepens our insight into this fundamental transformation. The sophisticated arts of the early empire, such as Pompeian painting, sculpted reliefs and silverware, entertain the potential for irony, parody, and deconstruction. By contrast, the symbolic arts of the Christian empire, notably the mosaics of Ravenna, eschew irony, while complexity remains, indeed intensifies, as multiple meanings compete to enrich a fundamentally sacred truth. By addressing the subtleties inherent in ancient viewing, this study embarks on a quest to enrich our understanding of an era of profound artistic change.

When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today.,

Docent Juliet Benner began showing people how to meditate on Christian art treasures, which led to her much-beloved "O Taste and See" columns from the spiritual formation journal Conversations, now expanded into this book. In each chapter you'll encounter a passage of Scripture and a corresponding piece of art to lead you in a new experience of prayer in God's presence.

How can pictures help people to relate to God, and what can historical Christian images offer the viewer today? A compelling theological encounter between Renaissance frescoes and the modern viewer. Transformations in Persons and Paint looks at images from the viewer's position, standing in a series of Florentine chapels, surrounded by frescoes, and discovering their powerful capacity to communicate what it means to live in a post-Resurrection world. Proving that there is still plenty to say about works by Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Masolino, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and Ghirlandaio, this book uncovers previously overlooked theological content, and demonstrates the rewards of attentive interaction between a modern viewer and historical images. Within the growing body of work on theology and the arts, this is a rare example of what can happen when a theological gaze is turned towards some of the classics in the canon of Christian art, while speaking directly to the modern viewer. Chloe Reddaway offers a new model of theological viewing, inhabiting both period and modern perspectives, and reinvigorating our understanding of the incarnational nature of Christian art by taking account of the particular physicality of images, especially as it is experienced through sacred space within and around them. Through close and imaginative encounters with images, a series of critical-devotional interpretations transforms beautiful artefacts into living explorations of the Incarnation and its consequences, the transformation and transfiguration that it enables, the particularity and interconnectedness of the created world, the generative capacity of liminal and (apparently) empty spaces, and the nature of vocation and conformity to Christ.

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.