Description: Senses of the Soul explores the way art and visual elements are incorporated into Christian worship. It incorporates research conducted in Los Angeles congregations. Through extensive interviews in a sample of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox congregations it looks into the way visual elements actually become part of the experience of worship. By looking at attitudes and experiences of beauty, art, and memories, it suggests that believers appropriate images and aesthetic encounters in terms of imaginative structures that have been formed through worship practices over time. By...

Description: Dust and Prayers offers an evocation of love, human and divine, and of the struggles of believers and unbelievers. It depicts something of the human condition apart from God and, through praise and lament, with humor and pathos it speaks of the divine remedy. It speaks of creation, too, and of the Creator, and of humanity (created in God's image), as dust and spirit. Its voice at times is free of the constraints of rigorous poetic forms. At other times its voice is set free by adherence to them. Its cry is biblical: Lord, "I believe; help my unbelief" (Mark 9:24) It references...

Description: In the wake of excessive evil--the Holocaust, genocide in Africa, tsunamis in Indonesia, terrorism, earthquakes, and floods--must one surrender belief in a good God? The poems in this volume, honest and reverent, arose from the struggle to answer that question with an emphatic ""No."" They exhibit the tension that also exists in the Bible where the expression ""Dust and Ashes"" occurs. When Abraham questioned God's justice involving the wholesale destruction of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah and an aggrieved Job responded to speeches from a whirlwind, their status as...

About the Contributor(s): Deborah Sokolove is Director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion and Associate Professor of Art and Worship at Wesley Theological Seminary. She is a regular contributor to ARTS, Lectionary Homiletics, and other journals. In addition to her writing and teaching, she is an artist with an active exhibition schedule.

Description: Preachers around the globe have come to rely on Will Willimon for insight and advice on the craft of preaching. For over a decade, Willimon has published his reflections in the ""Five-Minute Preaching Workshop,"" a quarterly column he writes as editor of Pulpit Resource. Here the best selections from that column have been brought together into a single volume for the first time. Drawing on years of experience, study, and careful observation of the current state of preaching, Willimon offers candid thoughts on a wide range of homiletical issues-from theological to pastoral,...

Description: Although Emily Dickinson is sometimes seen as a religious skeptic, she never gave up on God, struggling with issues of faith and doubt throughout her life. Many of her poems depict such struggles, sometimes with humor and sometimes with despair. Reading and reflecting on these poems can be a powerful way to listen to and experience God through the arts. Mending a Tattered Faith presents, first, an accessible introduction to the mysteries of Dickinson's life and poetry, considering her relationships to her family and the church, the significant poetic strategies she employed, and...

This ethnographic study focuses on the religious imagery and practices of a sample of Buddhist temples and Muslim mosques in the greater Los Angeles area. As a way of expanding interfaith dialogue, it is framed as a conversation between the largely Christian researchers and the seventy-five respondents, who were asked about the images, space, and practices of their religious experience. From the respondents in their various religious settings, it seeks to distill the specific religious imaginations and aesthetic profiles that might be said to characterize their experience--to discover what...

Description: Blessed is a collection of dramatic monologues that engage the gospel narratives surrounding Mary, the mother of Jesus, through the experiences of contemporary women. Bridging proclamation and protest through theater, the pieces invite the reader to stand at the intersection of faith and doubt alongside women giving birth to the Word in the world, women like Mary--broken and blessed. Endorsements: ""Neal brings her considerable gifts and lays them at the feet of the church. These dramatic pieces are part theater, part prayer, and part sermon. She has compassionately knit together...

Dance in Scripture: How Biblical Dancers Can Revolutionize Worship Today examines the dances of seven biblical figures: Miriam, Jephthah's daughter, David, the Shulamite, Judith, Salome, and Jesus. Each figure offers a virtue that has the potential to revolutionize worship today. Yarber combines feminist and queer hermeneutics with dance history to highlight the nuances of the texts that often go unnoticed in biblical scholarship, while also celebrating the myriad ways the body can be affirmed in worship in creative, empowering, and subversive ways. Liberation, lamentation, abandon, passion,...

Description:
ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art examines the application of art historical methods to the history of Christianity and art. As methods of art history have become more interdisciplinary, there has been a notable emergence of discussions of religion in art history as well as related fields such as visual culture and theology. This book represents the first critical examination of scholarly methodologies applied to the study of Christian subjects, themes, and contexts in art.

ReVisioning contains original work from a range of scholars,...