In Christian faith, the present is continuously re-shaped by ventures of hopeful and expectant living. In art, the poetic interplay between past, present and future takes specific concrete forms, furnishing vital resources for sustaining an imaginative ecology of hope.This volume attends to the contributions that architecture, drama, literature, music and painting can make, as artists trace patterns of promise, resisting the finality of modernity's despairing visions and generating hopeful living in a present which, although marked by sin and death, is grasped imaginatively as already pregnant with future.

In hope, Christian faith reconfigures the shape of what is familiar in order to pattern the contours of God's promised future. In this process, the present is continuously re-shaped by ventures of hopeful and expectant living. In art, this same poetic interplay between past, present and future takes specific concrete forms, furnishing vital resources for sustaining an imaginative ecology of hope. This volume attends to the contributions that architecture, drama, literature, music and painting can make, as artists trace patterns of promise, resisting the finality of modernity's despairing visions and generating hopeful living in a present which, although marked by sin and death, is grasped imaginatively as already pregnant with future.

The central contention of Christian faith is that in the incarnation the eternal Word or Logos of God himself has taken flesh, so becoming for us the image of the invisible God. Our humanity itself is lived out in a constant to-ing and fro-ing between materiality and immateriality. Imagination, language and literature each have a vital part to play in brokering this hypostatic union of matter and meaning within the human creature. Approaching different aspects of two distinct movements between the image and the word, in the incarnation and in the dynamics of human existence itself, Trevor Hart presents a clearer understanding of each and explores the juxtapositions with the other. Hart concludes that within the Trinitarian economy of creation and redemption these two occasions of ’flesh-taking’ are inseparable and indivisible.

Postmodern, Marxist, and Christian Historical Novels: Hope and the Burdens of History argues historical novels can help readers receive the burdens of history—meaning both the burdens of the past, present, and future and the burden of living in time—and develop a more robust conception of and concrete practice of hope. Since the 1960s, historical novels have been a dominant literary genre, but they have been influenced primarily not by Christian but by postmodern and marxist thinkers and writers. This book provides a theological and literary analysis of all three types of historical novels—postmodern, marxist, and Christian—and outlines what each school of thought can learn from each other regarding historical understanding and hope. Using Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope and Frank Kermode’s literary criticism as a theoretical basis, the book offers readings of novels by Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, and Ursula LeGuin, among others, and ends with an extended analysis of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series.

In the digital world, Kierkegaard's thought is valuable in thinking about aesthetics as a component of human development, both including but moving beyond the religious context as its primary center of meaning. Seeing human formation as interrelated with aesthetics makes art a vital dimension of human existence. Contributing to the debate about Kierkegaard's conception of the aesthetic, Kierkegaard, Aesthetics, and Selfhood argues that Kierkegaard's primary concern is to provocatively explore how a self becomes Christian, with aesthetics being a vital dimension for such self-formation. At a broader level, Peder Jothen also focuses on the role, authority, and meaning of aesthetic expression within religious thought generally and Christianity in particular.

For almost two millennia, Jesus' story has been retold in various forms and fashions but in the last century a new way of reimagining the man from Galilee has sprung up in the form of novels about the life ofJesus. While the novels themselves are asvaried as their authors, this work aims to introduce readers to some common literary strategies and theological agendas found in this phenomenon by surveying a few prominent examples. It also explores the question of what happens when we examine theintertextual play between these reimaginings and their Gospel progenitors as we allow these contemporary novels to pose new questions to their ancient counterparts. An intriguing hermeneutical circle ensues as we embark on our quest for the fictional Jesus and accompany his incarnations as they lead us back to re-examine the canonical portraits of Jesus anew.

This book examines the connections between film and Christianity, considering how films express and depict Christian faith and spirituality and provide experiences associated with it. The notion of movement as immobility (from Simone Weil) is employed to describe film and its images in motion. Its movements can reconnect us with the movements of the world, those motions in which a mysterious sense of order, what Weil calls "immobility," arises. Film is understood as a privileged form to access inscrutable spiritual (in)visibilities that can be linked with Christian concepts and practices. The chapters in Exploring Film and Christianity offer new studies of famous directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson combined with analyses of recent notable films, including Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, Martin Scorsese’s Silence, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Organized around the productive topics of theory, expression, depiction and experience, this volume is a valuable contribution to interdisciplinary research on film and Christianity.

In this volume on the Holy Spirit, “Missed Treasures” designates the rich pneumatologies in the New Testament books and letters beyond Paul, John, and Luke-Acts. Depictions of the Holy Spirit in Matthew, the Letter of James, Revelation, and other books are analyzed and incorporated into the theological tapestry of New Testament thought. Another unique feature of this volume is its focus on the numinous presence of God in the sweep of Israel’s history; there are chapters on the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Wisdom of Solomon that trace Christian pneumatology back to its source, the Hebrew Scriptures. In short, this volume expands the scholarly conversation exponentially as it explores a complement of texts spanning the New Testament and reaching back into the Hebrew Scriptures. A lucid guide to the distinctive pneumatologies of the New Testament, this collection is must reading for all who would engage the dialogue between scriptural study and systematic theology.

Living Theodrama is a fresh, creative introduction to theological ethics. Offering an imaginative approach through dialogue with theatrical theory and practice, Vander Lugt demonstrates a new way to integrate actor-oriented and action-oriented approaches to Christian ethics within a comprehensive theodramatic model. This model affirms that life is a drama performed in the company of God and others, providing rich metaphors for relating theology to everyday formation and performance in this drama. Different chapters explore the role of the triune God, Scripture, tradition, the church, mission, and context in the process of formation and performance, thus dealing separately with major themes in theological ethics while incorporating them within an overarching model. This book contains not only a fruitful exchange between theological ethics and theatre, but it also presents a promising method for interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and the arts that will be valuable for students and practitioners across many different fields.

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.