Sara Schumacher has written previously on “The Relationship between the Artist and the Church,” arguing that artists must resist the temptation to view themselves as prophets in exile for “becoming a victim … inhibits true reconciliation.”[1] In this post I’d like to…
It is not uncommon to hear theologians speak of a “relational turn” in our thinking about personhood. The idea, it seems to me, is that 20th century thinking about personhood shifts away from an individualistic understanding of the person as…
Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald & the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy Magdalen College, Oxford, 13 – 15 August 2014 The “Inklings,” an Oxford group that included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams, has long been recognized as…
Over the holidays, I entered my tenth year of seeing every film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture before the Oscar broadcast. Among them was The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese’s latest boasting a weighty NC-17 rating from the…
There is an important point that, if more widely recognized, might defuse some of the controversy incited by Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937; The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, New Line Cinema and MGM,…
Greetings from St Andrews, Transpositions and the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA). As you may well know, Transpositions began in the summer of 2010 when a group of students in ITIA started discussing how they might bring…
Christopher Shields, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, xx + 710 pp., £95.00 cloth. In his Preface, Shields notes: “The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle does not seek to be a general compendium of Aristotelian thought nor even a full…
G. Walter Hansen and Bruce Herman. Through Your Eyes: Dialogues on the Paintings of Bruce Herman. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013, xxi + 117 pp., £32.99 cloth. I’ve been waiting to see this book ever since I heard that it was in…
Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, 150 pp., £29.50 cloth. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition of seventeen works by Rembrandt from late in his career, held in 2005 at the National Gallery…