When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind

ISBN-13: 9780190279769 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 232 str.

Philip S. Francis; Randall Balmer

Opis

The stories gathered in these pages lay bare the power of the arts to unsettle and rework deeply ingrained religious beliefs and practices. This book grounds its narrative in the accounts of 82 Evangelicals who underwent a sea-change of religious identity through the intervention of the arts. "There never would have been an undoing of my conservative Evangelical worldview" confides one young man, "without my encounter with the transcendent work of Mark Rothko on that rainy afternoon in London's Tate Modern." "The characters in The Brothers Karamazov began to feel like family to me," reports another individual, "and the doubts of Ivan Karamazov slowly saturated my soul." As their stories unfold, the subjects of the study describe the arts as sources of, by turns, "defamiliarization," "comfort in uncertainty," "a stand-in for faith" and a "surrogate transcendence." Drawing on memoirs, interviews, and field notes, Philip Salim Franics explores the complex interrelationship of religion and art in the modern West, and offers an important new resource for on-going debates about the role of the arts in education and social life.

Recenzje

Given the increasing number of op-ed pieces by evangelicals considering abandoning that title in the age of Roy Moore and Donald Trump, however, Francis's text provides a timely and rigorous exploration of the benefits of escaping absolute certainty, a clear divide between those who have welcomed Jesus into their lives and those that haven't, an all-or-nothing commitment to evangelical Christian ontology, and an over-evaluation of a mythical past of truer faith. This text would work well in an advanced undergraduate seminar, offering students insightful and approachable accounts of an enormous body of social theory, while also encouraging them to think about their own various crises of faith Similar to My Utmost, When Art Disrupts Religion offers new ways of thinking about conversion beyond common narratives of "rupture" offered by convertsto or from Christianity themselves.

O autorze

Philip S. Francis is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Maine Farmington and Melon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum. His research explores the shifting interrelationship of religion, art, and sexuality in the modern West.