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As engagement with art is increasingly recognized as an exciting and accepted practice in theology, theologians are faced with questions concerning the purposes of such engagement and how best to undertake it. This article argues that engagement with art is not merely the purview of an esoteric subdiscipline known as "Theology and the Arts" but offers an opportunity for theologians to confront the humanity at the heart of their own work, including guilt, error, and corruption, which will enable progress toward the goal of greater intimacy and belonging. Taking seriously the idea that both our theological concepts and our intellectual habits have been shaped by social and material realities, this article asks how we ought to think about theological engagement with art given that we are prone to colonizing habits of thought that affect such engagement. By putting theologians including Willie Jennings and Emilie Townes in conversation with theories about art from T.J. Clark, Alva Noe, and James A. Noel, we ask how theologians might resist temptations to categorize art as theology's other or absorb it into its own concerns, both of which reflect colonizing habits of mind and inure theology against a genuine confrontation with art. We recommend a posture of silence, responsive to the silence of the painting itself, in which the theologian opens to self-reflexive questions about both the operations of their own imagination, creativity, imagery, silence, and more, as well as the implications for the theological concepts used to designate those realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While theology has been in conversation with literary theories for some time, there has been little attention to literary form in theological texts. This leaves us at a disadvantage in understanding how theological texts function in relation to the world in which they are read. This article proceeds through the text Analogia Entis by Erich Przywara from the perspective of three literary approaches to form: aesthetic formalism, new historicism, and new formalism. It suggests that emerging approaches to form gathered together under the heading "new formalism" best explain how a theological text can have disruptive effects beyond the context in which it was first written. Whereas aesthetic formalism abstracts theological texts from their historical contexts so as to render them above critique and new historicism suggests theological texts reproduce the social conditions out of which they arise, a new formalist reading of Przywara shows how we might conceptualize theological texts as opening new possibilities in the contexts in which they are read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparison between the use of rhythm by philosophers Erich Przywara and Giorgio Agamben for dialogue between Catholic metaphysics and postmodernism. Topics discussed include Przywara's concept analogia entis in theology, Christian analogy and Agamben's conception of rhythm in explicit dialogue with Aristotle.

Recent scholarship on the concept of flesh in Christianity points to the body's susceptibility to change and influence from material phenomena as well as from social and discursive forces. But what are the processes by which such forces shape the body? This article argues, by analyzing three Christian practices from distinctive contexts—the Hesychast Jesus Prayer, medieval liturgical dance, and African American preaching—that rhythm is a key to understanding these processes. Each practice forms a body capable of connecting with spiritual forces by leveraging the body's material rhythms and their symbolic associations through a process called entrainment in relation to a particular social context. The analysis of each practice, therefore, contributes to our understanding of how material and nonmaterial factors work together in the process of religious formation by uncovering the ways in which rhythm connects both dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the similarities between the ethics and theology of Blaise Pascal and Stanley Hauerwas regarding natural law, original sin and witness, in order to support Pascal as an important thinker for Christian ethics. It argues that Pascal’s theological anthropology is an important contribution to Hauerwas’ ethics by elucidating less clear dimensions of his thought, such as how it is that witness ought to proceed and might be effective despite human sinfulness, and the relation between human corruption and a rejection of natural law. This also serves to support the argument that Pascal is an important figure for Christian ethics, despite being largely neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]