Visual Piety

This superb collection of essays challenges the growing tension about religion and the arts by dissecting the intriguing ways religion and the arts have inte frsected in a long, vivid, necessary, and largely positive relationship from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. The essays here are unusually strong, sophisticated, mature, and insightful. They are remarkably readable, not merely for art historians but for a broadly interested and intelligent audience. The result is a truly fascinating collection whose essays touch on a wide range of important and fascinating topics in the two-hundred year experience of both American art and American religion. —Jon Butler, Yale University, author of Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People and Religion in American History: A Reader.

This book is at the interface between Visual Studies and Biblical Studies. For several decades, scholars of visuality have been uncovering the significance of everyday visual practices, in the sense of learnt habits of viewing and the assumptions that underpin them. They have shown that these play a key role in forming and maintaining relationships in religious devotion and in social life. The 'Visual Studies' movement brought issues such as these to the attention of most humanities disciplines by the end of the twentieth century, but until very recently made little impact on Biblical Studies. The explanation for this 'disciplinary blind-spot' lies partly in the reception of St Paul, who became Augustine's inspiration for platonising denigration of the material world, and Luther's for faith through 'scripture alone'. In the hands of more radical Reformers, the Word was soon vehemently opposed to the Image, an emphasis that was further fostered in the philologically-inclined university faculties where Biblical Studies developed. Yet Paul's piety is visual as well as verbal, even aside from his mystical visions. He envisages a contemplative focus on certain this-worldly sights as an integral part of believers' metamorphosis into Christ-likeness. This theme runs through Romans, but finds its most concise expression in his correspondence with the Corinthians: 'We all, with unveiled face, beholding in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being metamorphosed into the same image, from glory to glory, as from the Lord, the Spirit' (2 Cor 3:18). Richly ambiguous and allegorical as this is, Paul shortly afterward defines an earthly site where this transformative, sacred gaze occurs. He insists that not mere death, but the death of Jesus is 'made manifest' in his suffering apostolic flesh. Rightly perceived, this becomes a holy spectacle for the sacred gaze, working life in those who behold in faith, but undoing those who see but do not perceive.

"Sacred gaze" denotes any way of seeing that invests its object—an image, a person, a time, a place—with spiritual significance. Drawing from many different fields, David Morgan investigates key aspects of vision and imagery in a variety of religious traditions. His lively, innovative book explores how viewers absorb and process religious imagery and how their experience contributes to the social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality. Ranging widely from thirteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century Tibet to contemporary America, Thailand, and Africa, The Sacred Gaze discusses the religious functions of images and the tools viewers use to interpret them. Morgan questions how fear and disgust of images relate to one another and explains how scholars study the long and evolving histories of images as they pass from culture to culture. An intriguing strand of the narrative details how images have helped to shape popular conceptions of gender and masculinity. The opening chapter considers definitions of "visual culture" and how these relate to the traditional practice of art history. Amply illustrated with more than seventy images from diverse religious traditions, this masterful interdisciplinary study provides a comprehensive and accessible resource for everyone interested in how religious images and visual practice order space and time, communicate with the transcendent, and embody forms of communion with the divine. The Sacred Gaze is a vital introduction to the study of the visual culture of religions.

This is the first book to bring together many aspects of the interplay between religion, media and culture from around the world in a single comprehensive study. Leading international scholars provide the most up-to-date findings in their fields, and in a readable and accessible way.Some of the topics covered include religion in the media age, popular broadcasting, communication theology, popular piety, film and religion, myth and ritual in cyberspace, music and religion, communication ethics, and the nature of truth in media saturated cultures.The result is not only a wide-ranging resource for scholars and students, but also a unique introduction to this increasingly important phenomenon of modern life.

Mirrors of the Divine brings into focus how four influential authors of the late ancient world--Tertullian of Carthage, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine of Hippo--employ language of vision and of mirrors in their discursive struggles to construct Christian agency, identity, and epistemology. Early Christian authors described the vision of God through the Pauline verse 1 Corinthians 13:12: "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face." Yet each author interpreted this verse differently, based on a diverse set of assumptions about how they understood seeing and mirrors to function: does vision occur by something leaving or entering the eye? Is one impacted by seeing or by being seen? Do mirrors offer trustworthy knowledge? Spanning the second through fourth centuries CE in both Eastern and Western Christianity, Mirrors of the Divine analyzes these four authors' theological writings on vision and knowledge of God to explore how contradictory theories of sight shaped their cosmologies, theologies, subjectivities, genders, and discursive worlds. As Emily R. Cain demonstrates, how the authors portray eyes reveals how they envisioned one's relationship to the world, while how they portray mirrors reveals how they imagined the unknown. Both have dramatic impacts on how one interprets what it means to see God through a mirror dimly. She shows that arguments about the phenomenon of visual perception are deeply intertwined with broader debates about identity, agency, and epistemology, and uncovers some of the most self-conscious ways that late ancient Christians thought of themselves, their worlds, and their God.

The book gives an account of various movements in art and their relation to the visual and in churches and in liturgy, for example the Franciscan movement, different approaches to the crucifixion, and the restoration of creation. It recovers the links between the cross and creation, and relates the baptismal covenant to a commitment to care for creation.

This book explores the power of sight for ancient rabbis across the realms of divinity, sexuality, idolatry and rabbinic subjectivity.

Who are the "Nones"? What does humanism say about race, religion and popular culture? How do race, religion and popular culture inform and affect humanism? The demographics of the United States are changing, marked most profoundly by the religiously unaffiliated, or what we have to come to call the "Nones". Spread across generations in the United States, this group encompasses a wide range of philosophical and ideological perspectives, from some in line with various forms of theism to those who are atheistic, and all sorts of combinations in between. Similar changes to demographics are taking place in Europe and elsewhere. Humanism: Essays on Race, Religion and Popular Culture provides a much-needed humanities-based analysis and description of humanism in relation to these cultural markers. Whereas most existing analysis attempts to explain humanism through the natural and social sciences (the "what" of life), Anthony B. Pinn explores humanism in relation to "how" life is arranged, socialized, ritualized, and framed. This ground-breaking publication brings together old and new essays on a wide range of topics and themes, from the African-American experience, to the development of humanist churches, and the lyrics of Jay Z.