T&T Clark Handbook of Theology and the Arts

Provides and up-to-date overview of the Christian theology-arts conversation with its various approaches, central themes and new directions.

This volume presents the theology-arts conversation from a distinctly Christian perspective, as a witness of the Gospel of Christ to the world. A widespread interest in the historical, socio-cultural and political embeddedness of theology and the arts permeates it.

This theme of embeddedness tracks through several overarching and interlocking concerns: the relationship between form and content (in both art and theology), the intensification of the metaphysical and the theological (contra materialist and positivist reductionisms), the expansion of the epistemological possibilities of the theology-art conversation, and a robust understanding of the world as the theatre of God's glory. Several chapters have been co-written by theologians and artists as part of demonstrating the kind of conversation that this book commends. A thorough-going commitment to Scripture is also woven into the many different habits of thought represented in this volume.

Part I surveys different approaches to the theology-arts conversation. Part II focuses on how particular art forms bring theological issues to the surface and how theological and denominational traditions shape the making and receiving of the arts. Part III delves into key topics in the current theology-arts scene and asks how artistic and theological performance can both speak to theological and artistic knowing, and help to celebrate and interrogate embodied, lived reality.