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Published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. September 2004, 2004
ISBN 10: 0802827837ISBN 13: 9780802827838
Seller: Montclair Book Center, Montclair, NJ, U.S.A.
Book
Paperback. Condition: USED Good.
Published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company September 2004, 2004
ISBN 10: 0802827969ISBN 13: 9780802827968
Seller: Eighth Day Books, LLC, Wichita, KS, U.S.A.
Book
Paper Back. Condition: New. The formative power of the beautiful is, first of all, an attraction. Trained as both artist and church historian, Robin Jensen astutely points out that attraction is the divine energy which enlivens beauty and serves as impetus for love's creative and transformative power. In her earlier book, Understanding Early Christian Art, Jensen concluded that ''both verbal and visual eventually come down to the same thing and reinforce one another.'' Just as John Cassian describes the effect of chanting the Psalms day after day -- ''He [the monk] will take into himself all the thoughts of the Psalmsanot as if they were the compositions of the Psalmist, but rather as if they were his own utterances and his very own prayer'' -- so, too, visual art engages us as spectator and creator -- drawing us into beauty, and by virtue of this imaginative encounter, helping us take responsibility for the subsequent life of art in the world. Jensen's survey in Substance of Things Seen encompasses visual art and spiritual formation in Christian tradition, the visual exegesis of narrative art in early Christianity, the question of the icon as idol or incarnation, the practical uses of art throughout the Christian centuries, the idea of holy places being sacred spaces, and a discussion of the beautiful and the disturbing in contemporary and ancient ''religious'' art. ''Unless we want to condemn ourselves to the starvation of the Christian imagination and the dissolution of the Christian conscience,'' writes Jensen, ''the church cannot ignore the arts.'' 152 pp.