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Death—The Gift of God to Man: Exploring the Understanding of Death in Tolkien’s Legendarium Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Martina Juričková
In his Middle-earth lore, Tolkien presents death as a special gift that Eru gave to Men alone, and not any other beings. This paper tries to answer why death can be understood as a gift even by us, even though this idea seems to contradict the traditional belief that death is a punishment for the sin of the first people in Paradise. As unorthodox as it may seem, this paper suggests that it might have
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Homoousios or Homoiosis: Redefining the Christian Image in the Wake of the Iconoclastic Controversy Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Arianne Conty
This article will elucidate the philosophy of the image that developed in the wake of the Iconoclastic Controversy in the Eastern Christian Empire in the ninth Century. Iconophilia was finally reinstated after a wave of iconoclasm swept across the Empire. The controversy coincides with dramatic changes within the Byzantine empire, making it difficult to establish consensus amongst scholars regarding
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The Musical Devil Revisited: Vercelli Homily X and Satan’s Fiddle Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Christina M. Heckman
This article argues that modern examples of the Devil as a player of plucked and bowed stringed instruments extend early medieval representations of the Devil’s music as a powerfully persuasive force that can be used to draw souls toward Satan and, conversely, to defend against his musical machinations. By examining Homily X of the Vercelli Book (c. tenth century) in relation to early medieval music
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Visualizing Buddhism Today: The Works of Jeong Hwa Choi, Kimsooja, and Do Ho Suh Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Mina Kim
Since Buddhism appeared around the fifth century BCE, it has established itself as a discipline that gives philosophical teachings to many people beyond religion. After the twentieth century, Buddhism has gone beyond being a representative ideology of the East and continues to be a social and cultural inspiration for many people worldwide. By focusing on the artworks of three Korean artists, Jeong
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From Medieval Sacred Art to Modern Photography Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Myrna Nader
In this study of image-making, it is argued that from the Middle Ages to the Modern period in Lebanon, coexistence between Christians and Muslims, who maintained contact alternately as a minority or dominant culture, was defined by fundamental ideas about sacred art, namely, the embodiment and depiction of the divine. The central premise holds that in Christianity paintings of a religious character
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Haloed Hallucinations Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Erik Eklund
Among the most popular hagiographies throughout Eastern and Coptic Christianity, Athanasius’ Life of Antony has exercised profound influence upon Western visual and literary art, not least Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister. Querying the alleged originality of Nabokov’s “symbol of the Divine power,” this article examines Nabokov’s engagement with the Antonian hagiographic tradition—represented by Athanasius’
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A House for the Spirit Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Gabriel Miller Colombo
This paper highlights the architectural theory and practice of the twentieth-century Dutch Benedictine monk and architect Dom Hans van der Laan as a lens through which to view architecture and urbanism’s underlying spiritual purpose. Van der Laan’s theologically grounded vision of architecture as a sacramental mediator between the human, the natural, and the divine and empirically based rubric by which
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Reception and Makings of African Vocal Ensemble Sounds beyond Binaries Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Kgomotso Moshugi
Since 1877, the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church from North America has established its presence in Southern Africa. As with missionization in other denominations, this introduced a variety of primarily Euro-American musical influences into African religious practices. Over the years, Adventist musicians have constantly negotiated a complex relationship to their African contexts, often yielding musical
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Art-Kut! The Counter-Cultural and Feminist Spirituality of Shamanism in Postwar South Korean Art Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Sooran Choi
On 17 January 1981, during a cold Winter Day at the height of an authoritarian military regime, a group of South Korean artists named “Baggat Misul [Outdoor Art]” gathered around a riverbank outside Seoul to interact with nature and called it “jayeon misul [nature art].” A young woman artist Yong-sin Suh performed an act the group called “a lark,” during which Suh alternated with two male artists in
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Diné Decolonization Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Elizabeth S. Hawley
In 2019, Diné artist Bean (Jolene) Nenibah Yazzie and their partner, poet and Tribal health advocate Hannabah Blue (also Diné), decided to get married. Desiring a traditional Diné ceremony, they sought a medicine person who would conduct a marriage ceremony. They struggled to find one, instead experiencing the homophobic and misogynistic ramifications of settler colonialism that continue to echo in
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Faith in Self Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Yasuyo Tanaka
In 1994, I migrated to New York City to pursue my art, freedom, and potential. Over the last 27 years, I learned to understand and respect the differences of people with different values, genders, religions, and races. I continued self-transforming by looking at issues from different angles with flexible thinking. Living far away from Japan, I reaffirmed my roots and rediscovered myself objectively
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Keeping the Faith Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Gillian Greenhill Hannum
In many cultures, women are the “keepers of the faith,” despite the fact that masculine pronouns are often used to identify deity or deities in most of the world’s major religions. In addition, many foundational leaders of these faiths were male—Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammed, and Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha). This double issue of Religion and the Arts seeks to explore the ways in which contemporary
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Mapping Spirituality in the Art of Sook Jin Jo Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Soojung Hyun
Korean-born artist Sook Jin Jo has produced a multidisciplinary array of sculptural installations for over three decades. Her primary materials consist of discarded wooden furniture, abandoned industrial materials, and trees from the natural environment. The assemblages, installations, and public art projects from these materials offer a renewed perspective on art. Sook Jin Jo broadens her philosophical
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On the Threshold of Different Realms Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Louis Ho
The motif of the mortal-spectral threshold runs through the practice of Singapore-based artist, Zarina Muhammad. Born Malay-Muslim, she identifies as a queer animist: her body of work is oriented around notions of the interstitial spaces that exist between the living and the otherworldly in Southeast Asian traditions, incorporating elements of ritual, magic, and the supernatural, poised in the discursive
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Radiant Livingness Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Karen Zukowski
This paper examines the Erol Beker Chapel of the Good Shepherd in St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York City, one of few extant immersive environments created by sculptor Louise Nevelson and the only one with explicitly Christian content. In the mid-1970s, Nevelson collaborated with Rev. Ralph Peterson, who commissioned the chapel within St. Peter’s, a new urban church in the Citicorp complex. Nevelson
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Religiosity and Spirituality in Linda Mary Montano’s Anorexia Nervosa Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Kyunghee Pyun
This paper presents a close-up reading of American artist and ex-member of the Maryknoll Sisters, Linda Mary Montano. Her performance in the video work, Anorexia Nervosa (1981) is analyzed in view of contemporary performance and video art by women artists in the second wave feminism. By positioning the experience of self-starving in the Catholic tradition of holy fasting and asceticism of self-starvation
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Self-Rooted Belonging and “Pleasing Dislocations” Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Zainab Abdali
This paper examines the interplay of religion, nationalism, and Muslim womanhood in the work of Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander. Specifically, I examine how Sikander’s work grapples with the problem of home and belonging for South Asian Muslim women in the face of religious, cultural, and nationalist discourses. These discourses characterize women as perpetual outsiders to the nation and
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“… that which wishes to articulate itself in you” Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Andy Izenson
Jewish anarchist mysticism weaves elusively through the worlds of art, politics, and religion, informing all three with the concept of do’ikayt, or “hereness.” This essay will bring together threads of the Jewish roots of the Dada and Surrealist movements as they burst into queerness with the work of Claude Cahun, William S. Burroughs, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and examine in particular the cut-up
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Women in Hindu Temple Art Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Shriya Sridharan
This paper will focus on the traditional or Agamic temples of South India, to explore the reasons why women are largely absent in significant hereditary roles determining the continuation of its art and ritual practices even at present. The art/ritual practice that women are primarily associated with is kolam-making. Kolams are geometric and abstract floor designs that are drawn by hand using impermanent
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Image and Word Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Joseph Houssni
The rapport between religion and film is not only historical but also ontological. The Abrahamic faiths specifically (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) and the audio-visual medium of cinema share a complex affiliation with reference to two of their foundational elements: image and word. Building on the constitutive kernels of the Abrahamic religion of Islam (image and word), this paper will locate
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Love, Knowledge, and Freedom in Pleasantville, Religious Scripture, and Wider Western Literature Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-06-15 David Carr
Love has long been extolled as a route to human moral and spiritual progress and fulfilment, not only in much past religious literature and narrative but in the more recent work of writers such as the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. In such texts, however, the sentiment (or virtue) of love is clearly more than just blind or brute passion and presupposes distinctive human capacities for knowledge
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“Pillar-Biters” and Beyond Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Daniel Jütte
A common motif in late medieval and early modern Northern European art is the “pillar-biter.” Usually, the pillar-biter is depicted as a man who clings to a column while biting into it, but there are also representations of men and women who embrace or kiss columns. In the iconographic literature, the motif is usually linked to religious hypocrisy and the dissimulation of piety. But why did premodern
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Akedah as an Actual Sacrifice Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-12-30 Monika Czekanowska-Gutman, Amitai Mendelsohn, Devorah Schoenfeld
Akedat Yitzhak (The Binding of Isaac) is one of the most powerful and yet horrifying narratives of the Hebrew Bible, describing a sacrifice which was ultimately not performed, as Isaac was not slaughtered. However, over the centuries Jewish exegesis developed a controversial tradition in which Isaac was in fact sacrificed. This paper traces this tradition from Midrashic texts through Hebrew Crusade
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Facing the Plague in Renaissance Italy Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-12-30 Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby
In this article I focus on two of the most prominent female saints: the Franciscan St. Clare of Assisi (1194–1253) and one belonging to the third order of Saint Dominic, St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380). I analyze a series of visual examples that picture their roles as saviors against epidemics and point out similarities and differences between them. I emphasize the power of the images in providing
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“Miserere Mei, Deus” Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-12-30 Joni Hand
In the late Middle Ages, the trials and tribulations of Job served as an exemplar for the devout as they made their way through their religious lives. His narrative became popular in private devotional manuscripts as a way to meditate on a life dedicated to God in spite of great hardships. This article will begin with a brief history of the development of Jobian iconography and the story of Job. This
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Religious Dimensions of Beethoven’s Ode “To Joy” Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-12-30 David B. Greene
Hearing a song, listeners can often pick up the syntactical relationships among its words only with great difficulty. The musical flow washes away most of the syntax, and the musical connections from one phrase to the next or one section to the next, sometimes even from one note to the next, are what connect the words to one another and give them meanings very different from their submerged syntactically
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Cistercian Adventures in Glass Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-09-23 Jonathan Koestlé-Cate
Stained glass windows created by Jean-Pierre Raynaud and Pierre Soulages for the Abbeys of Noirlac and Conques employ a minimalistic style sensitive to their Romanesque contexts but also express qualities one might call Cistercian, even though only one of the commissions was created for an actual Cistercian abbey. As a form of monasticism, “Cistercian” signifies values of simplicity, poverty, and austerity
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Modernism, Identity, and Spirituality in Joseph Stella’s Paintings of Christian Subjects Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-09-23 Herbert R. Hartel
Joseph Stella is best known today as one of the first modernist painters in the United States. He created colorful Cubist-Futurist inspired paintings of modern urban structures and spaces, especially the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island. He occasionally did some paintings and drawings of Christian subjects, most often of the Virgin Mary and Jesus and more frequently in the late-1910s and 1920s, but
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Visualizing the Emperor’s Pantheon Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-09-23 Zhenpeng Zhan
In the early 1740s, a set of carved lacquer containers were imperially commissioned in Suzhou to hold Daoist and Buddhist scriptures transcribed by the Qianlong emperor. Decorated with numerous deities in bas-relief, these understudied luxury objects shed new light on Buddhist and Daoist material cultures at the High Qing court and offer a glimpse of the imperial patron’s religious cosmology. Focusing
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Between Eccentricity and Morbidity Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-06-03 Maggie Atkinson
This examination asserts that artist and photographer Hannah Maynard’s association with late-nineteenth-century North American organizations that advocated the often-repudiated notion of the possibility of spiritual life after physical death informed her photographs. Spiritualists offered numerous examples of alternative existences after corporeal demise, and this paper will explore the possibility
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The Circle of Karma and Siddhartha Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-06-03 Vijay Prakash Singh
For a long time, Herman Hesse’s celebrated Siddhartha (1922) popularized a version of Buddhism in the West. However, by comparing it to Kunzang Choden’s The Circle of Karma (2005), the first Bhutanese novel published in English, with its similar plot of a seeker, this essay finds the ways it displays a Westernized ideal of Buddhism. Unlike The Circle of Karma, Siddhartha actually relies on Western
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It’s All Eve’s Fault Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-06-03 Yaffa Englard
The traditional reading of the biblical account of the Garden of Eden has left a weighty imprint on Western civilization, holding Eve solely to blame for introducing sin into the human world and thus the loss of Paradise, suffering, and death. This paper seeks to demonstrate the way in which Jewish and Christian theological and interpretative traditions of this story are concretely exemplified in medieval
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The Poetics of Sensational Forms Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-06-03 Ana Nolasco
This article seeks to analyze the drift of elements of Azorean popular religion into the domain of art orchestrated by two Azorean artists, Catarina Branco and Sofia de Medeiros. The change brings unlikely marriages into fruition, uniting the humor of pop art and the solemnity of the arches of the high choir in a church, the spirit of revelry and a sign of the cross, representing the unfathomable—death
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Reflections of the Real Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-06-03 Giulia Privitelli
In this paper, Caravaggio’s painting of The Beheading of St John the Baptist located in the Oratory of the Co-Cathedral of St John the Baptist, in Valletta, Malta, will serve as a backdrop to qualify and analyze the religious and aesthetic experiential value that such an artwork could generate within the beholder, by considering its eschatological and soteriological implications and context, as well
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“And My Sin Is Ever Before Me” (Psalm 51: 3) Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-04-21 Daniel M. Unger
The article highlights the added value with which the scene of David with the head of Goliath has accumulated in the seventeenth century. During this period these paintings were intended to represent the young David as a penitent saint atoning for his sins rather than the divinely supported triumph of the young shepherd over Goliath, the skilled and talented military hero. What is emphasized is the
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The Holy Book Which Is a Book Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-04-21 Richard Hughes Gibson
For more than two centuries, publishers and critics have tried to design an English Bible that would be easy to hold and a delight to read. This essay tracks various attempts to design such a bible, beginning with early nineteenth-century printings that sought to declutter the bible page and to break the thick book into multiple volumes, before turning to early calls to revise the Authorized Version
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Incarnating Image Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-04-21 Sara Malton
This essay examines the significance of Frederic Leighton’s illustrations of George Eliot’s historical novel of Renaissance Florence, Romola (1862–1863). Leighton’s illustrations form a crucial part of Eliot’s vision of her heroine’s movement toward spiritual liberation. Eliot and Leighton together figure this evolution as a pilgrimage that takes us from the Old Testament to the Gospel of John, concluding
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Making Sense of the Psalms Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-04-21 Henk Vogel, Mirella Klomp, Marcel Barnard
This article discusses the appropriation of psalms in contemporary Dutch and Flemish culture through their performances in ‘extra-ecclesial’ settings and the ways in which aesthetics and embodied experiences play a role in this appropriation. Drawing on postsecular theory, we describe how both religious and secular dimensions are manifest in the performance of psalms on the level of aesthetics. Our
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Seeking Zion Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-04-21 Lindsay Katzir
This article looks at Grace Aguilar (1816–1847), a well-known Anglo-Jewish author, as a religious Zionist, and it analyzes Aguilar’s work in order to challenge three scholarly assumptions about the history of Zionism: first, that British Jews have never genuinely supported Zionism; second, that Zionism did not exist before Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism; and third, that Jewish women
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The Spirit of Labor Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-04-21 Rebecca Soares
Although typically characterized as authors of social realism or social gospel fiction, respectively, Elizabeth Gaskell’s and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s nineteenth-century industrial novels defy traditional generic designations through their deployment of supernatural and spiritualist discourse to otherwise decidedly earthly and material subjects. Creating a genre that I call spiritual realism, these
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Pilgrimage: Journeys of Meaning, by Stanford, Peter Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Lynne Charoenkitsuksun
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Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism: T.S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim and the Moot, by Kurlberg, Jonas Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Charles A. O’Connor
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Evangelical Gothic: The English Novel and the Religious War on Virtue from Wesley to Dracula, by Herbert, Christopher Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Alison Fanous Cotti-Lowell
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Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare’s Revenge Tragedies, by Lake, Peter Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Kimberly Bressler
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Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe, by Herrin, Judith Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Lynne Charoenkitsuksun
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Religion Around John Donne, by Eckhardt, Joshua Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Laura Sterrett
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Allen Ginsberg’s Jeremiad: Queer Utopia, Religious Mythology, and the Undoing of Modernism Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-12-15 Caleb Murray
“Howl” continues to capture popular and academic imaginations. This article explores the categorical fault lines between modernist and postmodernist epistemologies as they are applied to Ginsberg’s poetic project. Reframing “religion” in postmodern terms, this article argues that even dominative categories and processes might be refashioned and deployed in the service of emancipatory and (counter)normative
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“But Such a Mind, Mak’st God Thy Guest”: Catholic Theology and Prudence in Ben Jonson’s Eupheme and Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of Venetia Digby Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-12-15 Steven Hrdlicka
Ben Jonson’s Eupheme poems and Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of Venetia Digby as Prudence have often been seen as art works fiercely at odds, and that particularly Jonson’s overall brash dismissal of the visual arts is epitomized in his poems in praise of Venetia’s life. Yet ample evidence within Eupheme supports the idea that not only are Jonson’s poems in peculiar ekphrastic conversations with Van
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“Extra-Special Care”: Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel as Liturgy Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-12-15 Gabriel Miller Colombo
This paper reads Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel through the lens of liturgical theology. It proposes that by revivifying collective memory—both its tragedies and joys—in a rhythmic, sensory, spatial, playful, and paradoxical way, the film forms our “social imaginary” for the better. In exploring the resonances between existing Anderson scholarship and liturgical theology, the paper
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Masked Violence: The Carnivalesque in Contemporary Bhutanese Film Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-12-15 Ivan Stacy
This article examines the carnivalesque in two recent Bhutanese films, Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait (2016, dir. Khyentse Norbu) and The Red Phallus (2018, dir. Tashi Gyeltshen). Bhutanese Buddhist rituals contain a number of elements that bear striking parallels with Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the carnivalesque, most notably in the use of masks and in the presence of jester figures known
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Leonardo’s Paradox: Word and Image in the Making of Renaissance Culture, by Keizer, Joost Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-12-15 Tiffany Hoffman
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The Judgment of Love: An Investigation of Salvific Judgment in Christian Eschatology, by Matarazzo Jr., James M. Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-12-15 Thomas Graff
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Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel, by Knight, Mark Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-12-15 Chad P. Stutz
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Companions in the Study Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Richard Hughes Gibson, James Edward Beitler
This essay considers John Ruskin’s “reading” of the stonework of fifteenth-century Venice for its lesson in virtues and then adapts his technique for reflection on scenes of St. Jerome in his study. The authors argue that these artifacts have more than art historical interest. They have spiritual interest. By looking backward to previous generations’ ways of imagining scholarship, we can gain a fresh
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The Eschatological Key: A Musical Approach to Christian Hope Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Rachel Douglass
In the first volume of his systemic series, German theologian Jürgen Moltmann begins his systematics with a musical metaphor; “The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything is set …” Moltmann then goes on to propose that the eschaton is a temporal event, which breaks the logic of his initial metaphor of the key signature
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Ethics, Subjectivity, and Alterity in King Lear: On Cordelia’s Defiance and Sacrifice Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Mehrdad Bidgoli
Cordelia’s defiance during the first scene of King Lear is among the thorniest issues in Lear criticism. There are also questions about her defiance in the first act and her sacrificial return in the fourth. Generally, critics either interpret her defiance negatively and condemn her (the question of her sacrifice remains equivocal), or they lay the blame on Lear’s absurdity and justify Cordelia’s silence
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The Fresco Cycle of Saint Maria Maddalena De’ Pazzi (1566–1607) Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Michal Shalit-Kollender
Saint Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, a Florentine Carmelite nun and mystic, was recognized as a saint in 1669. After her canonization, a church in Florence was renovated and renamed Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, and new artworks were commissioned for it. This article will explore in detail a series of ten frescoes on the top section of the walls in the church, part of the renovation. Although these
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In-Between Identities: Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing, by Waldmeir, John C. Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Alfons H. Teipen
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Armenia: Art, Religion and Trade in the Middle Ages, by Evans, Helen C., ed. Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Arthur Aghajanian
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Finding the World’s Fullness: On Poetry, Metaphor and Mystery, by Cording, Robert Religion and the Arts Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Leticia del Toro García