William Dyrness examines how particular theological themes of Reformed Protestants impacted on their surrounding visual culture.

An intriguing, substantive look into the relationship between the church and the world of art.

What are the poetics of everyday life ? What can they teach us about God? Art, music, dance, and writing can certainly be poetic, but so can such diverse pastimes as fishing, skiing, or attending sports events. Any and all activities that satisfy our fundamental need for play, for celebration, and for ritual, says William Dyrness, are inherently poetic and in Poetic Theology he demonstrates that all such activities are places where God is active in the world. All of humanity s creative efforts, Dyrness points out, testify to our intrinsic longing for joy and delight and our deep desire to connect with others, with the created order, and especially with the Creator. This desire is rooted in the presence and calling of God in and through the good creation. With extensive reflection on aesthetics in spirituality, worship, and community development, Dyrness s Poetic Theology will be useful for all who seek fresh and powerful new ways to communicate the gospel in contemporary society. William Dyrness s bold invitation to a poetic theology shaped by Scripture, tradition, and imagination one luring us toward a fuller participation in beauty than argument or concept alone allow reminds us that truth itself is beautiful to behold and poetic to the core. . . . If poetry is in its deepest reflex an intensification of life, then Dyrness s call for a poetic theology is one we ignore at our peril, reminding us that faithful living is not only about proper thinking but also and, perhaps, more properly about the texture of our living and the quality of our loving. Mark S. Burrows Andover Newton Theological School Makes a strong case for aesthetics as one of the avenues used by God to draw human beings near to him and his glory. . . . A wonderful journey through Reformed spirituality and a wake-up call for Reformed theology. Cornelius van der Kooi Free University, Amsterdam

Statues coming to life and lively portraits ready to breathe in Shakespeare? This new volume re-assesses the key role played by visual culture in his drama and poetry by providing readers with an up-to-date guide to the main publications on the subject as well as offering a synthesis on the main literary and historical sources for inspiration. While scrutinising the complex issue of image on an Elizabethan stage and exploring the codification of colours in Shakespeare's poetry, this dictionary highlights the fierce rivalry between the poet, the dramatist and the visual artist. This volume will be of great interest and value to students of Shakespeare, students of art history or anyone working on the interdisciplinary subject of literature and art.

Religions teach their adherents how to see and feel at the same time; learning to see is not a disembodied process but one hammered from the forge of human need, social relations, and material practice. David Morgan argues that the history of religions may therefore be studied through the lens of their salient visual themes. The Forge of Vision tells the history of Christianity from the sixteenth century through the present by selecting the visual themes of faith that have profoundly influenced its development. After exploring how distinctive Catholic and Protestant visual cultures emerged in the early modern period, Morgan examines a variety of Christian visual practices, ranging from the imagination, visions of nationhood, the likeness of Jesus, the material life of words, and the role of modern art as a spiritual quest, to the importance of images for education, devotion, worship, and domestic life. An insightful, informed presentation of how Christianity has shaped and continues to shape the modern world, this work is a must-read for scholars and students across fields of religious studies, history, and art history.

This book offers a unique analysis of visual religion in Reformation England as seen in its religious printed images. Challenging traditional notions of an iconoclastic Reformation, it offers a thorough analysis of the widespread body of printed images and the ways the images gave shape to the religious culture.

Over the course of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, an interior private notion of religion gained wide public recognition. It then spread through settler colonial contexts around the world. It has since been criticized for its abstract, immaterial nature as well as its irrelevance to traditions beyond the European context. However, such critiques obscure the contradiction between religion’s definition as a matter of interior privacy and its public visibility in various printed publications. Timothy Stanley responds by re-evaluating the cultural impact of the exterior forms in which religious texts were printed, such as pamphlets, broadsheets, books, and journals. He also applies that evidence to critical studies of religion shaped by the crisis of representation in the human sciences. While Jacques Derrida is oft-cited as a progenitor of that crisis, the opposite case is made. Additionally, Stanley draws on Derrida’s thought to reframe the relation between a religious text’s internal hermeneutic interests and its external forms. In sum, this book provides a new model of how people printed religion in ways that can be compared to other material cultures around the world.