Body Of Clay Soul Of Fire

"Body of Clay, Soul of Fire" will delight art lovers, potters, and collectors, as well as everyone who is interested in Japanese and Benedictine traditions. Richard Bresnahan is a preeminent American potter and an ambassador for the natural environment. Reared on a farm in North Dakota, he graduated from Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and apprenticed as a potter in Japan. Returning to Saint John's, where he is an artist in residence, he built a massive wood-burning kiln, which, with its innovative flame flues and water channels, dwarfs all other North American kilns. By digging his own clay, using local seeds and hulls as glazing materials, and firing with deadfall, Bresnahan also practices a brand of environmentalism worthy of his Benedictine surroundings.

At least since the time of Paul (see Acts 18), Christians have wrestled with the power and danger of religious imagery in the visual arts. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that there emerged in Western Christianity an integrated, academic study of theology and the arts. Here, one of the pioneers of that movement, H. Wilson Yates, along with fourteen theologians, examine how visual culture reflects or addresses pressing contemporary religious questions. The aim throughout is to engage the reader in theological reflection, mediated and enhanced by the arts. This beautifully illustrated book includes more than fifty images in full color.

This is a study of the most fascinating and idiosyncratic of all seventeenth-century figures. Like its famous predecessor The Cheese and The Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, it explores the everyday life and mental world of an extraordinary yet humble figure. Born in Lincolnshire with a family of Cambridgeshire origins, Thomas Totney (1608-1659) was a London puritan, goldsmith and veteran of the Civil War. In November 1649, after fourteen weeks of self-abasement, fasting and prayer, he experienced a profound spiritual transformation. Taking the prophetic name TheaurauJohn Tany and declaring himself 'a Jew of the Tribe of Reuben' descended from Aaron the High Priest, he set about enacting a millenarian mission to restore the Jews to their own land. Inspired prophetic gestures followed as Tany took to living in a tent, preaching in the parks and fields around London. He gathered a handful of followers and, in the week that Cromwell was offered the crown, infamously burned his bible and attacked Parliament with sword drawn. In the summer of 1656 he set sail from the Kentish coast, perhaps with some disciples in tow, bound for Jerusalem. He found his way to Holland, perhaps there to gather the Jews of Amsterdam. Some three years later, now calling himself Ram Johoram, Tany was reported lost, drowned after taking passage in a ship from Brielle bound for London. During his prophetic phase Tany wrote a number of remarkable but elusive works that are unlike anything else in the English language. His sources were varied, although they seem to have included almanacs, popular prophecies and legal treatises, as well as scriptural and extra-canonical texts, and the writings of the German mystic Jacob Boehme. Indeed, Tany's writings embrace currents of magic and mysticism, alchemy and astrology, numerology and angelology, Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Christian Kabbalah - a ferment of ideas that fused in a millenarian yearning for the hoped for

In August 2020, Richard Bresnahan's "Kura: Prophetic Messenger" became the first permanent installation of the Jon Hassler Sculpture Garden on the grounds of Saint John's Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota. Richard is the founder and director of the Saint John's Pottery and for more than 40 years has served as artist-in-residence of Saint John's University and the College of Saint Benedict. The intention of the book is to describe the people, thought processes, materials, and stories that compose the sculpture "Kura: Prophetic Messenger." But even this is not complete, because the stories will go farther and have traveled further than we know. "Kura: Prophetic Messenger" is a teaching sculpture, with a message for the present and a deep well of care for the future. The Saint John's Pottery is based on the integration of aesthetic, scientific, humanistic, and moral approaches to living in a symbiotic relationship with nature. Ceramics are made following ancient Pacific Rim methods and through the stewardship of local resources. The studio's apprenticeship and education programs, as well as long-term design and planning, support the environment and community so that the creative process may speak to and span across generations.