ABOUT
In the summer of 2010, a group of students in the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) started discussing how they might bring the conversation of theology and the arts to a broader audience, one beyond the academy. The result was Transpositions.
The official online journal for the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts, Transpositions takes its name from C.S. Lewis’s essay of that same name. In it, Lewis reflects on the ‘continuity between things’ natural and supernatural, earthly and heavenly, or material and spiritual. The key, he suggests, is to interpret the material world as ‘a sign’ of transcendent realities — but also ‘more than a sign, because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present’. And this is the transposition that occurs: something infinitely rich, something that exceeds signification, is transposed into the world of signs.
Isn’t that the heart of any discussion on theology and the arts? To discern the way an excessive immaterial reality is mediated, revealed, transposed, or intuited by material forms?
That is the aim of Transpositions: to explore the world’s hidden depths via the tangibility of made things. If, as Anselm says, theology is ‘faith seeking understanding’, then Transpositions is here to enrich and interrogate that understanding through critical engagement with art of all kinds.
At Transpositions, you’ll find writing with a keen interest in:
BEAUTY
Throughout the ages, philosophers and theologians alike have theorized about beauty’s call — its source and wellspring, its material and transcendent life. At Transpositions, we are interested in ideas of beauty in relation to the life of God, and how the arts help us examine this.
IMAGINATION
More than just fanciful, we believe the imagination is a revelatory faculty, capable of apprehending inconceivable realities in ways that complement the faculty of reason, enhancing the lifelong journey of seeking God.
THE ARTS
From contemporary film and painting to renaissance drama and poetry, our journal engages a wide range of material and mediums. We aren’t genre snobs and can wax ad nauseum about the writing of George Eliot and contemporary pop songs in the same breath, and are constantly drawing connections across and through time, genre, and form.
THEOLOGY
Our theological engagement is transdenominational and spans every century of church history. From the patristics to the scholastics, the reformers to contemporary philosophical theology, and everything in between, our interlocutors range widely, each helping us unearth new angles of meaning in the art to which we’re drawn.
PHILOSOPHY
From aesthetics to ethics or philosophy of language, we are interested in philosophical discourse that implicates and enriches our conversation about both the arts and divine life. Curious what Wittgenstein might say about Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events? Wondering how one might read Lana Del Ray through the eyes of Jean Paul Sartre? How Plato bears on the medieval conception of divine beauty? Same here.
CREATION
If we live in a world of signs, conversations about theology and the arts have direct bearing on conversations about ecology and creation. From the weight of sculpture to the vibrancy of paint, the locatedness of contemporary art in situ, the materiality of language, or the physicality of an orchestra, conversations about art can be rich conversations about our created surroundings.
Whether coming to theology via the arts or vice versa, our journal threads the needle between both, creating a rich space at the intersection where these subjects can be considered in dialogue — critically, fruitfully, and imaginatively.