In 1897 - only two years after the invention of film - the first feature film about Jesus appeared. This and other films about Jesus became examples for and an inspiration for films on other important religious figures like Rama, Buddha and Muhammad. Although religious leaders did not always approve of these films, they did find a ready audience among believers. This book explores these films and looks at how these films dealt with the fundamental question of portraying an individual thought to have either divine status or a very special and unique status among human beings. This book will...

The key wager of Traversing the Heart - Journeys of the Inter-religious Imagination is that a spiritual imaginary operating at the level of metaphor, narrative, symbol and epiphany can traverse the borders of dogma and ideology and open genuine conversations between wisdom traditions. Like every hermeneutics of the heart, this journey begins to unfold in a concrete space and time: the interreligious conference at Bangalore in June 2007. While this collection does not claim to cover the religious traditions of all continents, its concluding essay on transculturation in Andean-Christian...

Most of the scholarship regarding the Dutch monk and architect Dom Hans van der Laan OSB (1904-1991) has been narrowly focused on his architectural theory and projects. The liturgical and theological dimensions have been virtually neglected, though they are vital for a proper understanding of his thought. Through a thorough reading of the original sources, including previously unexplored documents from various archives, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach to Van der Laan's theory. It brings together the different aspects of his work by studying both the liturgical-theological and...

This book is not designed to define the sacred. It is, rather, a bringing together of case histories (a rich, varied collection from medieval, early modern and nineteenth-century contexts in England and Wales) that goes beyond familiar paradigms to explore the dynamic, protean interaction, in different times and places, between sacred space and text. Essentially an interdisciplinary enterprise, it focuses a range of historical and critical methodologies on that complex process of transformation and transmission whereby spiritual intuitions, experiences and teachings are made palpable 'in art...

"The Crescent on the Temple" by Pamela Berger elucidates an obscured tradition--how the Dome of the Rock came to stand for the Temple of Solomon in Christian, Muslim, and Jewish art. The crusaders called the Dome of the Rock the "Temple of the Lord," while Muslim imagery depicted Solomon enthroned within the domed structure. Jews knew that the ancient Temple had been destroyed. Nevertheless, in their imagery, they commonly labeled the Muslim shrine "The Temple." That domed "Temple" was often represented with a crescent on top. This iconography, long hidden in plain sight, reflects one aspect...

Titus shoots his arrows bearing petitions for justice to the gods; Claudius asks 'what form of prayer can serve my turn?'; Lear wishes he could crack the vault of heaven with his prayers. Again and again, Shakespeare dramatises the scenario of the unheard prayer, in which the one who prays does so full well in the knowledge that no one is listening, interested, or even there at all. The scenario is keyed to the anxieties that surrounded the act of praying itself, so full as it was with controversy, the centrepiece of sectarian dispute over what was good and bad religion. This study reads the...

Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse stages an encounter between the fields of 'Modernism and Christianity' and 'Apocalypse Studies'. The modernist impulse to 'make it new', to transform and reform culture, is an incipiently apocalyptic one, poised between imaginative representations of an Old Era or civilization and the experimental promise of the New. Christianity figures in formative tension with the 'new', but its apocalyptic paradigms continued to impact modernist visions of cultural revitalization. In three sections tracing a rough chronology from the late nineteenth century...

In Spiritus Loci Bert Daelemans, who graduated as an architect and a theologian, provides an interdisciplinary method for the theological assessment of church architecture. Rather than a theory, this method is based on case studies of contemporary buildings (1995-2015), which are often criticized for lacking theological depth. In a threefold method, the author brings to light the ways in which architecture can be theology - or theotopy - by focusing on topoi (places) rather than logoi (words). Churches reveal our relationship with God by engaging our body, mind, and community. This...

Protestant theology and culture are known for a reserved, at times skeptical, attitude to the use of art and aesthetic forms of expression in a religious context. In Transcendence and Sensoriness, this attitude is analysed and discussed both theoretically and through case studies considered in a broad theological and philosophical framework of religious aesthetics. Nordic scholars of theology, philosophy, art, music, and architecture, discuss questions of transcendence, the human senses, and the arts in order to challenge established perspectives within the aesthetics of religion and...