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Adam Edward Carnehl

In critical yet appreciative dialogue with four different art critics who demonstrated theological sensitivities, Adam Edward Carnehl traces an ongoing religious conversation that ran through nineteenth-century aesthetics. In Carnehl's estimation, this critical conversation between John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, culminated in the brilliant approach of G. K. Chesterton, who began his journalistic career with a series of insightful works of art criticism. By conducting a close reading of these largely neglected works, Carnehl demonstrates that Chesterton developed a theological aesthetic that focuses on the revelation of God's image in every human being. In Chesterton's eyes, only those made in God's image can produce images themselves, and only those who receive a revelation of truth are able to reveal truths for others. Art is therefore a rich and symbolic unveiling of the truth of humanity which finds its origin and purpose in God the Divine Artist.

Cascade Books

KALOS

The Artist as Divine Symbol: Chesterton’s Theological Aesthetic

Kirsten Pinto Gfroerer

This is a book of letters, letters to Julian of Norwich concerning her Revelations of Divine Love. It is an attempt to search for my life by giving myself heart and soul to the teaching of a text and it is about the possibilities of transformation that ensue. 

Julian makes extreme claims about the love of God revealed in the body of Christ on the cross. She claims that in love the human self can truly flourish and in the end that "all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." I need to know if these claims are true. Thus, I write letters, ask questions, and look for answers as to how to indwell the vision given to Julian, while engaging the limits of my personhood and the modern paradigms that constrain my thoughts. I bring my whole being to the correspondence, I am changed, and I do find my life.

Anchorhold: Corresponding with Revelations of Divine Love

Dariusz Karlowicz

Many contemporary writers misunderstand early Christian views on philosophy because they identify the critical stances of the ante-Nicene fathers toward specific pagan philosophical schools with a general negative stance toward reason itself. Dariusz Karłowicz's Socrates and Other Saints demonstrates why this identification is false.

The question of the extent of humanity's natural knowledge cannot be reduced to the question of faith's relationship to the historical manifestations of philosophy among the Ancients. Karłowicz closely reads the writings of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and others to demonstrate this point. He also builds upon Pierre Hadot's thesis that ancient philosophy is not primarily theory but a "way of life" taught by sages, which aimed at happiness through participation in the divine.

The fact that pagan philosophers falsely described humanity's telos did not mean that the spiritual practices they developed could not be helpful in the Christian pilgrimage. As it turns out, the ancient Christian writers traditionally considered to be enemies of philosophy actually borrowed from her much more than we think--and perhaps more than they admitted.

Socrates and Other Saints: Early Christian Understandings of Reason and Philosophy

Artur Sebastian Rosman

Steven D. Cone

Humans are made in the image of God, and authentically coming to be human means to become like him. This work pursues a robust and renewed theology of grace in conversation with the patristic traditions of Irenaeus, the Cappadocian Fathers, and Augustine, the medieval theology of Maximus and Aquinas, and such modern interlocutors as Soren Kierkegaard, Bernard Lonergan, John Milbank, and John Behr. It thereby regrounds our interpretation of Scripture in the wide tradition of the church. By doing so, it argues that Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection form the only possible point of reference by which we can understand the universe, as God creates it and works in it to bring us into union with himself.

An Ocean Vast of Blessing: A Theology of Grace

Paul Tyson

Could it be that we have lost touch with some basic human realities in our day of high-tech efficiency, frenetic competition, and ceaseless consumption? Have we turned from the moral, the spiritual, and even the physical realities that make our lives meaningful? These are metaphysical questions--questions about the nature of reality--but they are not abstract questions. These are very down to earth questions that concern power and the collective frameworks of belief and action governing our daily lives. 

This book is an introduction to the history, theory, and application of Christian metaphysics. Yet this book is not just an introduction, it is also a passionately argued call for a profound change in the contemporary Christian mind. Paul Tyson argues that as Western culture's Christian Platonist understanding of reality was replaced by modern pragmatic realism, we turned not just from one outlook on reality to another, but away from reality itself. This book seeks to show that if we can recover this ancient Christian outlook on reality, reframed for our day, then we will be able to recover a way of life that is in harmony with human and divine truth.

Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times

Chanon Ross

Spectacles designed to capture our attention surround us. Marketing, movies, shopping malls, concerts, and virtual realities capture our imaginations and cultivate our desires. We live in a "society of the spectacle." However, is the power and prevalence of spectacle unique to the modern era?

In the pages of Gifts Glittering and Poisoned, early Christian voices echo across the centuries to show that the society of the spectacle is not new. Our era resembles a time when the spectacular entertainments of ancient Rome had a profound effect on every aspect of social life. By drawing on the rich theology and witness of early Christianity, Gifts Glittering and Poisoned asks what it means for us to live in a new era of empire and spectacle. Through Augustine's description of the demonic, it shows how consumerism constructs a sophisticated symbolic order, a "society of the spectacle," that corrupts our deepest longings for God.

Gifts Glittering and Poisoned: Spectacle, Empire, and Metaphysics

The word kalos (καλὸς) means beautiful. It is the call of the good; that which arouses interest, desire: "I am here." Beauty brings the appetite to rest at the same time as it wakens the mind from its daily slumber, calling us to look afresh at that which is before our very eyes. It makes virgins of us all, and of everything--there, before us, lies something that we never noticed before. Beauty consists in integritas sive perfectio [integrity and perfection] and claritas [brightness/clarity]. It is the reason why we rise and why we sleep--that great night of dependence, one that reveals the borrowed existence of all things, if, that is, there is to be a thing at all, or if there is to be a person at all. Here lies the ground of all science, of philosophy, and of all theology, indeed of our each and every day.



This series will seek to provide intelligent-yet-accessible volumes that have the innocence of beauty and true adventure, and in so doing remind us all again of that which we took for granted, most of all thought itself.



Series Editors:

Christopher Ben Simpson

Dr. Simon Oliver