Art And The Human Enterprise Iredell Jenkins

This treatise on the importance of what the artist does--especially the man of letters--examines recent Christian appraisals of the creative enterprise and argues that Protestant interpretations of culture today are marred by their departure from Biblical faith in God as Creator. Today, theologians find themselves writing more and more about painting, music, poetry, drama, and the novel. Many are convinced that no definition of man or interpretation of his condition is adequate if it ignores man as a creator. Some Christian writers have been content to explore the possibilities of new dialogue between religion and the arts. Others have sought to develop a theology of art--a systematic interpretation of what artists are doing, why they are doing it, and what it means in the context of the Christian story about nature, man, and God. In doing so, they have used either the image of creation, the cross, or consummation as their point of departure for an interpretation of the artist's venture. Dr. Harned examines the merits and problems involved in the use of each image for the appraisal of the human enterprise and contends that consummation must use the doctrine of God as Creator in order to be useful to contemporary Christianity. He emphasizes the need for Protestantism to recover the idea of "the natural" and defines it in a way congruent with the theology of the Reformers. Here are insightful answers for all who want to understand the importance of the arts, why theologians are concerned with literature and painting, and how that concern has been expressed.

In a systematic overview of classical and modern contributions to aesthetics, Professor Sparshott argues that all four lines of theory, and no others, are necessary to coherent thinking about art. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This selection of articles by Lewis E. Hahn addresses the philosophical school of contextualism and four contemporary American philosophers: John Dewey, Henry Nelson Wieman, Stephen C. Pepper, and Brand Blanshard. Stressing the relatively recent contextualistic worldview, which he considers one of the best world hypotheses, Hahn seeks to achieve a broad perspective within which all things may be given their due place. After providing a brief outline, Hahn explains contextualism in relation to other philosophies. In his opening chapter, as in later chapters, he expresses contextualism as a form of pragmatic naturalism. In spite of Hahn's high regard for contextualism, however, he does not think it would be good if we were limited to a single worldview. "The more different views we have and the more different sources of possible light we have, the better our chances that some of these cosmic maps will shed light on our world and our place in it."

The Spirit of American Liberal Theology is an interpretation of the entire U.S. American tradition of liberal theology. A highly condensed and far-more-accessible summary of Gary Dorrien’s three-volume trilogy, The Making of American Liberal Theology (Westminster John Knox Press 2001, 2003, and 2006), Dorrien here presses the argument that the most abundant, diverse, and persistent tradition of liberal theology is the one that blossomed in the United States and is still refashioning itself. While discussions of English and German liberalism persist, new material includes expanded treatment of the Black social gospel, the Universalists, developments into early 2020s, and a robust expression of the author’s post-Hegelian liberal-liberationist perspective.

In this first of three volumes, Dorrien identifies the indigenous roots of American liberal theology and demonstrates a wider, longer-running tradition than has been thought. The tradition took shape in the nineteenth century, motivated by a desire to map a modernist "third way" between orthodoxy and rationalistic deism/atheism. It is defined by its openness to modern intellectual inquiry; its commitment to the authority of individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an ethical way of life; and its commitment to make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people. Dorrien takes a narrative approach and provides a biographical reading of important religious thinkers of the time, including William E. Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Charles Briggs. Dorrien notes that, although liberal theology moved into elite academic institutions, its conceptual foundations were laid in the pulpit rather than the classroom.

This book explores the relationship between theology and the modern university. Most of the essays were written specifically for this volume, and all of them are published here for the first time. David Ray Griffin, Gordon Kaufman, Hans Küng, Schubert Ogden, and Wolfhart Pannenberg address the question of whether theology belongs in the university at all. Essays by Joseph Hough, Catherine Keller, and Marjorie Suchoki argue that theology has a vital role in helping the university recover its central mission, that of educating for the sake of the common good. Thomas Altizer, William Beardslee, and Jack Verheyden provide historical analyses of the interactions between theology and the university, with Altizer focusing on the modern divorce between faith and reason, Beardslee on the relevance of the renewed emphasis upon rhetoric, and Verheyden on the ideal of knowledge. As a whole Theology and the University presents an impressive case against the position that theology is inappropriate in the university. It argues not only that theology has a rightful place in the university, but also that the university needs theology, just as theology needs the university.

Releasing the genius of an individual, an enterprise and a society is a central pre-occupation of the contemporary business environment. A fascinating approach to how we can begin to tackle this challenge is presented by the authors of Integral Polity. Integral spirituality, integral philosophy and the integral age, at an overall or holistic level of consciousness, has therefore become a strong enough idea to form the genesis of a movement over the course of the last half century. Taking as a starting point the ground-breaking work of the Trans4m Centre for Integral Development this book applies such an ’integral’ notion to the realms of business, economics and enterprise. To be successful, an integral approach must recognise the nuances of its environment - an integral approach in India is different from that in Indonesia, or Iceland, and they may in fact complement rather than conflict. Therefore this book also provides a fascinating alignment of such ’integrality’ with, and between different ’southern’ and ’eastern’, ’northern’ and ’western’ worlds. Using case studies ranging across the globe this review of a newly integral theory and practice provides a new lease of life to what may increasingly be perceived as the self-seeking, insulated and occasionally violent and corrupt, realm of the political.

Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called “art,” and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore the human species’ four-million-year evolutionary history. This book offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art. Art, meaning not only visual art, but music, poetic language, dance, and performance, is for the first time regarded from a biobehavioral or ethical viewpoint. It is shown to be a biological necessity in human existence and fundamental characteristic of the human species. In this provocative study, Ellen Dissanayake examines art along with play and ritual as human behaviors that “make special,” and proposes that making special is an inherited tendency as intrinsic to the human species as speech and toolmaking. She claims that the arts evolved as means of making socially important activities memorable and pleasurable, and thus have been essential to human survival. Avoiding simplism and reductionism, this original synthetic approach permits a fresh look at old questions about the origins, nature, purpose, and value of art. It crosses disciplinary boundaries and integrates a number of divers fields: human ethology; evolutionary biology; the psychology and philosophy of art; physical and cultural anthropology; “primitive” and prehistoric art; Western cultural history; and children’s art. The final chapter, “From Tradition to Aestheticism,” explores some of the ways in which modern Western society has diverged from other societies--particularly the type of society in which human beings evolved--and considers the effects of the aberrance on our art and our attitudes toward art. This book is addressed to readers who have a concerned interest in the arts or in human nature and the state of modern society.