Art : Religious

Early Christians and Animals presents a colourful and comprehensive overview and analysis of the significance of animals in early Christian thought, tradition, text and art. more...

Price: $125.00

King of the Confessors is Thomas Hoving's gripping account of the extraordinary events surrounding the Metropolitan Museum of Art's purchase, in 1963, of the magnificent medieval carved walrus ivory cross which the Museum calls 'The Cloisters Cross', but Hoving calls 'The Bury St Edmunds Cross'. This new edition contains revelations that render the events even more extraordinary, and explains why Hoving thinks the Museum has got it wrong. more...

Price: $17.95

This is the first volume to examine the urgent and important issues facing new religions in their political, legal, and religious contexts covering Western Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, Russia and Eastern Europe, and North and South America. more...

Price: $39.95

"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. more...

Price: $15.95

The Spirit of Secular Art: A History of the Sacramental Roots of Contemporary Artistic Values explains the spiritual prestige of art. Various theorists have discussed how art has an aura or indefinable magic. This book explains how, when and why it gained its spiritual properties. The idea that all art is somehow spiritual (even though not religious) is often assumed; this book, while narrating the historical trajectory of art in the most accessible language, reveals how the mysteries of religious practice are abstracted and saved through all stages of secularisation in European culture. The Spirit of Secular Art presents a coherent theory defining the sacred basis of Western aesthetics. It evocatively describes the afterlife of the holy from Ancient Greece to the present, and outlines how the mysterious institution of art can be explained in material terms. Unlike other books in the genre, The Spirit of Secular Art radically deconstructs traditional art history in terms of 'prestige' and the value of the non-material. The book functions as: * an alternative critical history of art, integrated with the histories of literature and belief * a philosophical essay on the fundamental values of art and religion * a critique of the spiritual conceits of contemporary aesthetics and art appreciation more...

Price: $37.95