What is beauty, or the beautiful? Does such a question have anything to do with theology, faith, ministry, or even the quotidian tedium and urgencies of life, properly speaking? Is this necessarily a theological matter, properly speaking? Or, in what manner might it become such a matter?
What is beauty, or the beautiful? Does such a question have anything to do with theology, faith, ministry, or even the quotidian tedium and urgencies of life, properly speaking? Is this necessarily a theological matter, properly speaking? Or, in what manner might it become such a matter? Are such questions ones that come to us with an abstracted neutrality, or are they not always bound by culture and tradition, memory and hope, desire and fear – and thus woven into a wider fabric of human experience than we alone can ever know? Is the question of beauty, in other words, one that always comes to us an ethical claim with real and “worldly” implications, reminding us that the aesthetic is both real in its transcendental referent as well as being inevitably and inherently social and political?
Click here to download the syllabus: Theological-Aesthetics.pdf