Faith and Beauty: A Theological Aesthetic

"Aesthetics" and "theological aesthetics" usually imply a focus on questions about the arts and how faith or religion relates to the arts: only the final pages of this work take up that problem. The central theme of the book is beauty. The author employs a new typology of western texts on beauty and a theological analysis of the image of God and redemption to counter the centuries-long tendency to ignore or marginalize beauty and the aesthetic as part of the life of faith. Studying the interpretation of beauty in ancient Greece, 18th-century England, the work of Jonathan Edwards, and 19th- and 20th-century philosophies of human self-transcendence, the author explores whether Christian existence, the life of faith, and the ethical exlude or require an aesthetic dimension in the sense of beauty.