This essay introduces and examines aspects of the theological aesthetics of contemporary Canadian artist, Michael D. O’Brien (1948–). It also considers how his philosophy of the arts informs understandings of the Catholic imagination. In so doing, it...
In this text, I explore what I have termed “aesthetic theology”. After noting the transference of religious content, function, etc., to art in Modernity, an act that has made art a locus theologicus once again, I analyse one of the main c...
This paper demonstrates that the figure of St. Francis of Assisi, as expounded by St. Bonaventure in his work Legenda Major (Major Legend), cannot be understood without certain philosophical and theological keys. Following an expository methodology,...
Christian philosophers, theologians, and artists regularly claim that experiences of beauty in art can function (i) as a road to God and (ii) as an encounter with God. These claims are well motivated by various Biblical texts and sophisticated theist...
The Tridentine Latin Mass (TLM) is rapidly growing in popularity. The movement that has formed around it has grown so attached to it as to threaten the unity of the Catholic Church. I attended TLMs in multiple distinct settings, studied the worshippe...
This study explores Eastern Orthodox aesthetics through a parallax lens, situating it at the intersection of theology, anthropology, and cultural practice to move beyond the icon-centric discourse. It examines how Orthodox aesthetics, rooted in the t...
This article places the conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark in conversation with hermeneutical debates within the field of theological aesthetics. By exploring the transformative effect Matta-Clark’s Splitting evokes on spatially related categ...
The aim of this article is to demonstrate why Catholic theology should actively engage with artistic images and elucidate how they could serve as a valuable resource for theological knowledge and content. The discussion is articulated in three distin...
This essay advances a theological reappraisal of Impressionist painting as a modern mode of sacramental perception capable of renewing the contemplative imagination within a disenchanted West. While recent scholarship has interpreted Impressionism as...
For seventeen centuries, basilica-plan churches have remained among Christianity’s most enduring architectural forms. Scholars have long argued that features such as bell towers, axial orientation toward the altar, upward light, noble materials...
In the thirteenth century, following Neoplatonic and Patristic trends, art and aesthetic experience were still treated as symbolic, as “vestiges” or “echoes” of the divine that lead us to it. However, in the early fourteenth c...
The intersection between religious experience and aesthetic experience has become so obvious that the current “aesthetic turn” in Christian theology no longer needs to be defended. In this essay, I discuss that intersection point from the...
In Restless Secularism (2017), Matthew Mutter points out that Wallace Stevens described three related techniques that could be used to attempt to purge secular life of its religious residue: adaptation, substitution, and elimination. Marilynne Robins...
This article explores apophatic ways of presenting God (the Other) in two films of Andrey Zvyagintsev. The lens for this analysis is the phenomenological theology of John Panteleimon Manoussakis, using the following concepts: (1) God as personal Othe...
Both feeling and thought operate largely through a process of associations. Some of these are learned; some seem to be transcultural. In Western art it has long been assumed that certain arrangement of sounds, shapes, and colors evoke particular emot...
This article establishes the framework for a (Christian) theology of fashion, the development of which comes under a research project set up between Luxembourg (Luxembourg School of Religion & Society) and Paris (Collège des Bernardins). T...
The article analyses the correlations between Latin American liberation theology and 19th-century Russian novel. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘threshold chronotype’, it contextualises the aesthetic and theological language of...
Georgian polyphonic chant and folk song is beginning to receive scholarly attention outside its homeland, and is a useful case study in several respects. This study focuses on the theological nature of its musical material, examining relevant example...
The subject of the beauty of the Virgin Mary was a delicate one in medieval aesthetic thought. Halfway between the sacred and the profane, the theological and the anthropological, the question of Mary’s beauty opened up a strictly material dime...
A theological exploration of the potential of non-liturgical instrumental music for the transmission of religious Christian faith experience, based on a hermeneutical tool drawn from Jean-Jacques Nattiez as applied to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel. ...
As the climate crisis continues to worsen and it becomes apparent that the earth faces its sixth mass extinction event, it is more important than ever to find an alternative to the disordered thinking that prevents meaningful environmental reform in...
Theological education positions spiritual formation as the primary mechanism for cultivating ministerial identity, yet this process is rarely socially neutral. This conceptual article contends that formation paradigms grounded in individualised model...
Recent developments in the disciplines of cinema studies, theology, and religion and film have generated renewed interest in the experiential dimensions of filmgoing. More specifically, those contributing to theological scholarship have begun to expl...
In their different languages, codes of expression, practices and worldviews, art and religion share a reflexive intention to symbolize the chaos, suffering and ambivalence of the real. In particular, the aesthetic programme of Christianity has sought...
Contemporary times are marked by a challenge to the public nature of theological discourse. This is increasingly analyzed from the point of view of its relevance and verisimilitude, within the framework of sociocultural and linguistic plurality. This...
This essay examines Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenal model of the Trinity expounded in his recent book D’Ailleurs, la révélation (2020) and attempts to give an initial assessment from a theological perspective. Since Marion&rsqu...
This article places Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s Chiliastic concept of Three Testaments into a unified structure. The author analyzes the writer’s integral system of Christological, anthropological, and historiosophicidiomyths and meta-symbols. He studies t...
The concept of functional beauty is characterized by including an aesthetic appreciation of objects that evaluates their efficiency in terms of satisfaction of attributions. As opposed to the concept of free beauty, which includes an appreciation of...
Engaging with Walter Benjamin’s concept of Eingedenken (remembrance), this article explores the pivotal role that remembrance plays in his attempt to develop a radically new vision of history, temporality, and human agency. Building on his essa...
This article examines the understanding of paideia in the writings of Photios of Constantinople (c. 810–893) and argues that his educational vision cannot be reduced to literary cultivation or the preservation of classical learning. While moder...
In contemporary Western society, fatness speaks for itself, affirming the fat person as an aesthetic and moral failure even before they say a word. Fat bodies, and fat female bodies in particular, are produced and reproduced as sites of excess and ob...
This article explores the often-overlooked question of how literary reading might give rise to experiences that readers themselves identify as spiritual. Framed by William James’s account of “mystical susceptibility” and recent psyc...
This article critically analyses the use of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)—specifically, the DALL·E system within the ChatGPT-4o environment—for creating visualisations of biblical scenes for teaching purposes. As part...
Most scholarship on the life and thought of Walter Benjamin does not seriously engage the phenomenon of religion or the philosophy of religion in his thought. While some scholarship considers Benjamin a German-Jewish thinker, placed in the company of...
The article will discuss works of art produced by Palestinian artists, in which the ornament functions as an intermediary for conveying signs, symbols, messages, and identities. In Muslim tradition, the ornament represented, and visually participated...
The cultural renaissance in 20th-century India has fostered an aesthetic integration of contemplative mysticism with popular religious practices, influencing various artistic and theological movements. This paper examines Christian artist Joy Elamkun...
This article examines the use of central elements of the Jewish religious repertoire and transcendental realm, such as prophecy or revelation, within the aesthetic secular realm of musical avant-garde and modern Hebrew literature. By focusing on two...
This article analyses the iconographic cycle of the Sacristy of the Virgin in the Basílica del Pilar, with the aim of unveiling the complex system of visual symbols present in its bas-reliefs. Through a typological and exegetical approach, the...
Dark theology as a theoretical approach emerged during debates on human rights and inclusion in Orthodox theology. It is realized at the junction of such disciplines as ecclesiology, political theology, philosophy, and social theory. It is based on t...
In this article, I propose that books I–VI of Bernardino Sahagún’s Códice florentino, which discuss the moral and religious philosophies of indigenous Mexicans, should be interpreted through the lens of Renaissance humanist...
The article is an exercise in constructing theology from a Latin American perspective in dialogue with queer studies and theologies. The starting point is the tragic death of Lorena Muniz, a transwoman, in the process of getting breast implants makin...
This study deals with the forms and expressions of the Christian piety of the Hungarian aristocracy in the early modern period on the example of Anton Erdődy (1714–1769), a representative of one of the most influential and most ancient Hun...
Ancient philosophers attached great importance to the ideals of unity, truth, goodness, and beauty as the path to the greatest good. Beauty expressed through works of art can open the eyes of the mind and heart and direct the human spirit to transcen...
This article reinterprets modern realist drama as a site of secular spirituality, where aesthetic form sustains the sacred under conditions of modern secularity. Employing a phenomenological–theological framework, it integrates Charles Taylor&r...
At an annual American Academy of Religion conference thirty years ago, Robert Scharlemann presented a paper in which he compared and contrasted Barth and Tillich with reference to how they named God in their respective theologies. He suggested that t...
This study explores “incapacitated transcendence”—a divine presence that remains ontologically present but lacks sovereign power to intervene—within Paul Klee’s angel paintings. It reinterprets these figures as a critica...
Bai Yuchan (白玉蟾, 1134?–1229?), a prominent figure of the Southern Lineage of Golden Elixir Sect 金丹派南宗 during the Southern Song dynasty, established a unique synthesis of Shenxiao Thunder R...
This article offers a descriptive analysis of a specific form (uṣūl) of prophetic eulogy (ṣalawāt) as vocally performed within Sufi orders such as the Rifāʿiyya, Qādiriyya, and Jarrahiyya of today’s Tür...
“Space wins” is a long-held homiletical maxim. Usually, this means that architecture and pulpit style influence how sermons are delivered and heard. What is less frequently considered is how monuments and memorials affect proclamation in...
Born the seventh son of a Louisiana preacher in 1942 and becoming the co-founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966, Huey P. Newton evidenced a complex, changing, and contradictory synthesis of faith and facts until his death in 1989. Focusing on 196...
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