Sacred Images

Sixty color and 15 bandw photographs utilize natural light and show Utah's prehistoric rock art images in the context of the surrounding canyons. The photos are presented with brief captions, and with the words of Ute, Paiute, Hopi, and Northwest Shoshone individuals who describe the what the art means to them personally. An introductory essay discusses the various artistic styles of native peopls of this region over a period of 8,000 years. N. Scott Momaday supplied the foreword. A lovely book. No index or references. 10x11" Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Enter into an ancient method of meditation and prayer using sacred icons and sacred images as has been done since the beginning of the Christian Church. Icons and sacred images are said to be, -windows into heaven-.

In the wake of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, the archbishop of Bologna, wrote a remarkable treatise on art during a time when the Church feared rampant abuse in the arts. Paleotti's 'Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images' argues that art should address a broad audience and explains the painter's responsibility to his spectators.

In these studies Gary Vikan has opened new perspectives on the daily life and material culture of Late Antiquity - more specifically, on icons and relics, and on objects revealing of the world of pilgrimage, the early cult of saints, and marriage. He contextualizes these familiar categories of object in the patterns of belief and ritual extracted from contemporary texts and the objects themselves, in order to understand their meaning within the everyday lives of those by whom and for whom they were made. The studies give a nuanced delineation of the inherently ambiguous boundary between conventional religion and magic, noting repeatedly those instances wherein the two are invoked in the same breath (and by way of the same art object), toward the same end. From this historically constructed matrix of art, belief, and ritual, the author derives an anthropologically defined paradigm of charisma and pilgrimage (applied in one essay, as an intriguing parallel, to deconstructing the world of a contemporary secular "saint," Elvis Presley).

A cultural history of representations of Jesus in nineteenth-century European and American fiction and visual art

In recent years, there has been growing awareness across a range of academic disciplines of the value of exploring issues of religion and the sacred in relation to cultures of everyday life. Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age offers inter-di