Art As A Pathway To God

This book integrates history, theology, and art and analyzes the Jesuits’ cross-cultural mission in late imperial China. Readers will find a rich collection of resources from historical sites, museums, manuscripts, and archival materials, including previous unpublished works of art. The production and circulation of art from different historical periods and categories show the artistic, theological, and missional values of Christian art. It highlights European Jesuits, Asian Christians, transnationalism, and gives voice to Chinese Christian women and their patronage of art in the seventeenth century. It offers a rare systematic study of the relation between art and mission history.

An art historian develops a theological, philosophical, and historical framework within which to experience and interpret modern and contemporary art that is in dialogue with the Christian faith.

Bible study and journaling questions guide women through Ruth and Esther, and help them apply biblical truths to their lives. With 12 weeks' worth of material that is perfect for small-group or individual use, the volumes in the Women's Bible Journal series contain more material than many small-group Bible studies.

This study investigates the significant role of art in Jesuit mission efforts in China (1552-1773). Archaeological materials and written texts reveal that Jesuits and Chinese Christians sustained their faith and expressed their devotion to God via art.

Everyone is not at the same level of intellectual or spiritual development. In order to assist the Creator, Soul, a product of God, needs co-worker training, largely experiential, that separates knowledge from belief. Since 1965, three pathways, with subsets of elementary, intermediate, and advanced components, surfaced that can potentially take one to specific levels of God's kingdoms. These pathways are the Intellectual, Psychic, and Spiritual (Eckankar, or Advanced religion). Instructors teach dream travel, Soul Travel, karma, reincarnation by which a current illness can be anchored to the past, mind passions, and development of the spiritual senses. An experiment given allows testing of the hypothesis that access to God's kingdoms is from within, and not from without.

Max Weber’s lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’ is a classic of social thought, in which central questions are posed about the nature of social and political thought and action. The lecture has often taken to be a summation of Weber’s thought. It can also be argued that, together with the responses of its admirers and critics, it provides a focus for discussion of the nature of modernity and its political consequences, and of the philosophical and political implications of the social or human sciences. This volume provides a full, clear, revised translation of the lecture, together with translations from the German of key contributions to the lively debate that followed its publication. The book concludes with a substantial essay on the current significance of the lecture, which discusses its relevance to the debates about the nature of science as a cultural phenomenon; the disjunction between science and nature; Weber’s conception of the disenchantment of the world; the division of scientific labour; and the fundamental nature and place of sociology.

Many find their engagement with works of art raises questions concerning where value is found and how meaning and import are understood and experienced. For persons of Christian faith, a parallel question arises concerning the significance such experience holds for the Christian life and the spiritual journey. This collection of essays pursues questions that address how we perceive value in our experience of the arts, how this experience leads to a greater measure of human fullness, and what significance engagement with the arts holds for the Christian life. The author argues that human experience and the quality of our personhood are enriched in and through the imaginative life and that our spiritual lives are profoundly impacted by our aesthetic engagements. An underlying assumption is that all great art, all that is beautiful, is inherently religious: that is, it embodies qualities that reflect the glory of God and is therefore valuable to the Christian life and one’s spiritual experience. Indeed, insofar as the noetic privileges language and reason, the arts and the domain of the aesthetic provide an alternate pathway by which we are able to encounter the Divine.

As an artist, Deborah Sokolove has often been surprised and dismayed by the unexamined attitudes and assumptions that the church holds about how artists think and how art functions in human life. By investigating these attitudes and tying them to concrete examples, Sokolove hopes to demystify art--to bring art down to earth, where theologians, pastors, and ordinary Christians can wrestle with its meanings, participate in its processes, and understand its uses. In showing the commonalities and distinctions among the various ways that artists themselves approach their work, Sanctifying Art can help the church talk about the arts in ways that artists will recognize. As a member of both the church and the art world, Sokolove is well-positioned to bridge the gap between the habits of thought that inform the discourse of the art world and those quite different ideas about art that are taken for granted by many Christians. When art is understood as intellectual, technical, and physical as well as ethereal, mysterious, and sacred, we will see it as an integral part of our life together in Christ, fully human and fully divine.