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A contribution to the field of theological aesthetics, this book explores the arts in and around the Pentecostal and charismatic renewal movements. It proposes a pneumatological model for creativity and the arts, and discusses different art forms from the perspective of that model. Pentecostals and other charismatic Christians have not sufficiently worked out matters of aesthetics, or teased out the great religious possibilities of engaging with the arts. With the flourishing of Pentecostal culture comes the potential for an equally flourishing artistic life. As this book demonstrates, renewal movements have participated in the arts but have not systematized their findings in ways that express their theological commitments—until now. The book examines how to approach art in ways that are communal, dialogical, and theologically cultivating.
Martin Buber’s embrace of Hasidism at the start of the twentieth century was instrumental to the revival of this popular form of Jewish mysticism. Hoping to instigate a Jewish cultural and spiritual renaissance, he published a series of anthologies of Hasidic teachings written in German to introduce the tradition to a wide audience. In Aesthetics of Renewal, Martina Urban closely analyzes Buber’s writings and sources to explore his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality as a form of cultural criticism. For Buber, Hasidic legends and teachings were not a static, canonical body of knowledge, but were dynamic and open to continuous reinterpretation. Urban argues that this representation of Hasidism was essential to the Zionist effort to restore a sense of unity across the Jewish diaspora as purely religious traditions weakened—and that Buber’s anthologies in turn played a vital part in the broad movement to use cultural memory as a means to reconstruct a collective identity for Jews. As Urban unravels the rich layers of Buber’s vision of Hasidism in this insightful book, he emerges as one of the preeminent thinkers on the place of religion in modern culture.
This title examines the motivations for the critiques that have been applied to the idea of aesthetics and argues that theorists and artists now hunger for a new kind of aesthetics, one better calibrated to contemporary art and its moral and political demands. The book shows how, for decades, aesthetic critiques have often concerned art's treatment of beauty or the autonomy of art. Collectively, these critiques have generated an anti-aesthetic stance that is now prevalent in the contemporary art world.
Avant-Garde Pieties tells a new story about innovative poetry; it argues that the avant-garde-now more than a century old-persists in its ability to nurture interesting, provocative, meaningful, and moving poems, despite its profound cultural failings and its self-devouring theoretical compulsions. It can do so because a humanistic strain of its radical poetics compels adherents to argue over the meaning of their shared political and aesthetic beliefs. In ways that can be productively thought of as religious in structure, this process fosters a perpetual state of crisis and renewal, always returning innovative poetry to its founding modernist commitments as a way to debate what the avant-garde is-what it should and does look like, and what it should and does value. Consequently, Avant-Garde Pieties makes way for a radical poetics defined not by formal gestures, but by its debate with itself about itself. It is a debate that honors the tradition's intellectual founding as well as its cultural present, which includes aesthetic multiformity, racialized and gendered modes of authorship, experiences of the sacred, political activism, and generosity in critical disagreement.
Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary-gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city. In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.
The decline of interest in the liberal and fine arts is widely lamented. At issue is why this decline happened and how we might restore qualitative standards by which to live. Arthur Pontynen argues that cultural decline is the consequence of a tragically anti-intellectual academic tradition—and its alternative is the cosmopolitan pursuit of wisdom and beauty. Pontynen writes that the liberal and fine arts are justified by their attempt to understand the material realization of wisdom, of that which is true and good in reality and life. The current decline marks a denial that such qualitative aspirations are realistic. Instead of understanding art as the intellectual pursuit of ontological perfection, perfection is subjectified as willful preference or experience. Consequently, the liberal and fine arts have been displaced by a naturalistic social science and a relational existentialism. This reduction denies qualitive thoughts, words, and deeds. Pontynen establishes that the arts are not obsolete, merely subjectivist, or limited to a brutal (de)constructivism. He argues for a renewed idealism that is neither reductionist, trivializing, or brutalized. Pontynen offers an alternative, global narrative that is both realistic and idealistic; one that permits us to distinguish between the trivial, the brutal, and the profound.
Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion of poetry, painting, and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of "imitation" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls "world-reflecting" and "world-simulating" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics.
Why is God's beauty often absent from our theology? Rarely do theologians take up the theme of God's beauty—even more rarely do they consider how God's beauty should shape the task of theology itself. But the psalmist says that the heart of the believer's desire is to behold the beauty of the Lord. In The Beauty of the Lord, Jonathan King restores aesthetics as not merely a valid lens for theological reflection, but an essential one. Jesus, our incarnate Redeemer, displays the Triune God's beauty in his actions and person, from creation to final consummation. How can and should theology better reflect this unveiled beauty? The Beauty of the Lord is a renewal of a truly aesthetic theology and a properly theological aesthetics.