Oscar Wilde once declared that he only put his talent into his works; his true genius, he insisted, had been reserved for his life. Foppish, brilliant, gleefully self-caricaturing (not even Bunthorne, Gilbert and Sullivan’s attempt at parody, could come close…
If the Christian faith is true, that is, if through the tragic event of the cross followed by the act of resurrection and ascension, God’s only Son, Jesus, not only introduces God’s new creation, but through the Holy Spirit re-humanizes humanity, then any…
George Steiner asks us in his essay ‘Absolute Tragedy’, “What are we meant to make of the Father’s descent into or absence from time during Christ’s agony?” For Steiner, this is the “enacted testing of theodicy”[1]. The central question is …
There might not be any better way to describe Sophia than by articulating how the pursuit of, and encounter with, wisdom in thought and culture radically shaped the very ethos of a Nation State. Nicholas Berdyaev, the Russian Philosopher, wrote…
Dr. Holly Ordway is Chair of the Department of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, and is the author of Not God’s Type: A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith. Her blog is Hieropraxis.com. Perhaps the most clearly aesthetic aspects of the…
Popular history in Protestant circles has often reimagined the medieval church as suffering from severe illiteracy in lay Christians. Images of Bibles chained to lecterns come to mind and the rally cry of sola scriptura takes on as much a visual…
Next week will see Transpositions host a symposium on Aesthetics and Liturgy, curated by Anna Blanch and Preston Yancey. Most broadly, liturgy can be defined as a pattern for worship. Though one can engage in a liturgy alone, it is…
In a 1976 article in Artforum magazine, critic Robert Horvitz asks: ‘To what extent, if any, and under what conditions, does morality have a higher claim on our actions and reactions than aesthetics?’[1] I will start off a series looking…
In Engaging Art Prize: A Storied Theology of the Arts [Part Two], I suggested that a rightly Storied theology of the arts, one that acknowledges art as created good and redemptive word, maintains the tension between the uselessness and usefulness of art. Besides…