From a recent release:

As of April 1, 2010, the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) will be available free of charge on the Getty Web site at http://library.getty.edu/bha. Free Web access to BHA is an advantage not only to all traditional users of the database but also to such potential users as institutions in developing countries and independent scholars worldwide, who until now have been unable to afford access to the BHA.

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BHA on the Getty Web site offers both basic and advanced search modules, and can be searched easily by subject, artist, author, article or journal title, and other elements. To search BHA, please visit, http://library.getty.edu/bha. Note that the database search includes both BHA (covering 1990-2007) and the International Bibliography of Art (IBA), covering the years 2008 and part of 2009. The Répertoire de la litterature de l’art (RILA), one of the predecessors of BHA, with records that cover 1975-1989, will be online by May 1.

Use the BHA at: http://library.getty.edu/bha

Popularity: 30% [?]

Dr. Steve Halla, an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the new Center for Theology and the Arts at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, will be presenting two lectures on theology and the arts Thursday, March 22, 2007. Dr. Halla is a trained woodcut artist and has taught at the University of Texas at Dallas and Dallas Theological Seminary. These lectures will be in the Cooke Choral Rehearsal Hall:

• 1:00 P.M.: “Pestilence, Death, and Worship in the Throes of Despair”
• 2:30 P.M.: “Light, Line, and Worship through Transformation of the Everyday”

Popularity: 22% [?]

Some new books of interest in our library:

From two volume set, The Age of Wars of Religion, 1000-1650: An Encyclopedia of Global Warfare and Civilization (Greenwood Press), under the entry “uniforms”:

“Outside Europe, uniform military dress was more common in this period. Boys inducted into the Janissary Corps, for instance, dressed in all red, including red caps. Fully trained Janissaries wore an exclusive white felt cap called a “Bork” which distinguished them on the battlefield. The Bork had wooden spoon attached, in line with nearly all unit symbolism in a corps where even officer ranks and titles expressed a culinary motif rooted in ritual meal sharing…” 2:886.

The Oxford History of Western Art, ed. Martin Kemp (OUP). From Greece and Rome to Postmodernism, this beautiful collection contains it all. Come, join the throngs of contemporary gnostics looking for hidden symbolism in the world’s great works of art. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of fodder for another book best-selling thriller. Just what was Durer trying to say with his 1525 Dream Vision? If only he would have told us… [Hint: he did.]

Popularity: 29% [?]

Sorry for the lapse in posting. I’ve been redesigning my other site, and with the holidays and all…

I have unusual books to highlight – all of which are new acquisitions in our library and are intended to help improve our weak art history holdings. Why does a theological library want to acquire works on the history of art? Well, because they serve as a visual representation of church history and even historical theology and biblical interpretation.

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Adelheid M. Gealt and George Knox. Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament. Bloomington: Indiana University Art Museum and Indiana University Press, 2006.
This is the first collected presentation of 313 drawings of scenes from the New Testament by 18th Century Venetian artist Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804). When Domenico died, the drawings were dispersed among various purchasers. The authors have hunted them down and collected them for us here. This book will accompany an exhibition of many of the original drawings at The Frisk Collection in New York.

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Alessandro Scafi. Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
The first book to show how heaven has been expressed in cartographical form throughout the last 2000 years, this book claims to reveal how thought about heaven has developed over the centuries. Illustrated with more than 190 historic maps and drawings. Scafi touches on the nature of faith, theology, reason, and philosophy.

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Corinna Rossi. The treasures of the Monastery of Saint Catherine. [text by Corinna Rossi; photographs by Araldo de Luca; foreword by Archbishop Damianos of Sinai; translation by Jay Jaseph Hyams]. Vercelli, Italy : White Star ; [New York : Distributed in US and Canada by Rizzoli International], 2006.
Simply a fascinating history of the Monastery of St. Catherine, a monastery founded in the 5th Century when the mother of Constantine funded its establishment on what was believed to be the original site of the burning bursh, this book is beautiful if nothing else. The monastery it chronicles is (I think) a Greek Orthodox monastery, and houses artwork, artifacts, and a library of texts that is second only to the Vatican (does the Codex Sinaiaticus sound familiar?). A fascinating pictorial chronicle of a very odd, but historically important, place.

Popularity: 23% [?]

More new titles of interest in the library:

Michael D. Bush, This Incomplete One: Words Occasioned by the Death of a Young Person (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). A moving compilation of funeral and grave-side messages given on the occasion of the untimely death of a younger person, this short work includes contributions by sixteen different authors ranging from Karl Barth (upon the death of his own son) to Jonathan Edwards. Nicholas Wolterstorff’s foreword commends the editors choices in saying,

Michael Bush, the editor, could have found many sermons preached by Christian pastors at the funeral of a child that are not authentically Christian — sub-Christian sermons, pseudo-Christian, barely Christian. He has done a great service by culling out these authentically Christian, grief-laden hope-affirming sermons. [p. x.]

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Paul Johnson, Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). If you have a taste for art, music, or literature, then you may find this book of interest. It describes the creative genius in the life and work of people such as Albrecht Durer, J. S. Bach, and Jane Austen, and concludes by saying, “All creators agree that [creating] is a painful and often a terrifying experience, to be endured rather than relished, and preferable only to not being a creator at all.” [p. 286] While not a Christian work, this book provokes reflection on the imago Dei in the human’s ability to create, whether by visual art or written expression. Plus, I just plain like Durer. The art in this blog’s header is by Durer.

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William E. Mann, ed., The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion (Malden, MA / Oxford, UK: 2005). All the topics you would expect to discuss in a typical philosophy of religion class at a typical university are addressed here. From Part I: The Concept of God, which covers omniscience, time, freedom, eternality and immutability, among others), through Part II: The Existence of God, which covers the ontological, cosmological, and design arguments as well as in introduction to theodicy, Part III: Religious Belief, and Part IV: Religion and Life, this book is clear and a relatively easy-to-read representation of the contemporary discussions of these issues. Just ask Wolterstorff. He loves it (see blurb on back cover).

Popularity: 28% [?]

At the behest of Russ (who himself has a blog, but, alas, I know not where), our resident computer genius, and in response to his passing chastisement concerning the recent inactivity here at CommonPlaces, I  give you these new and interesting book acquisitions in the library:

Nancy Kalikow Maxwell, Sacred Stacks: The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006). Much of this book is pure drivel. It is, after all, a product of the ALA. The second chapter, however, was really quite interesting: Librarians Perform Sacred Functions. I came to be a librarian after several years of pastoral ministry, and so I found this chapter’s comparisons of librarians and clergy to be rather interesting (dare I say “insightful?”). That most clergy and librarians are INFJ in personality type is understandable. As is the comparison of librarians with ministers, especially in my context at a theological seminary. I was intrigued by her discussion of “Librarians as Respected Priests,” “Librarians and Receivers of Confessions,” “Librarians as Seers and Gurus,” and “Librarians as Magicians.” She obviously attributes way too much secular religiousity to the vocation of librarianship. Her points about libraries promoting community and transmitting culture to future generations, however, are extremely valid points. But perhaps the author goes a bit far in comparing librarians with “Ascetic, Self-Sacrificing Monks.” Oh, and it wouldn’t be an ALA product without “Librarians as Prophets for Social Justice.”

Charlotte Kroeker, ed., Music in Christian Worship: At the Service of the Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005). I mention this book only in order to recommend the first chapter, “Thinking About Church Music,” by the recently retired Nicholas Wolterstorff from Yale University. Wolterstorff’s philosophical argumentation usually goes way over my head, but I found this chapter to be particularly clear. His discussion of “fittingness” in musical style is especially helpful. Though I may not agree with all that he has to say here (I am, however, still chewing on much of it), it is refreshing to read something substantive and objective on the issue. And not by a Southern Baptist with a church to grow.

Ryan K. Smith, Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Just plain interesting.

Roger Homan, The Art of the Sublime: Principles of Christian Art and Architecture (Ashgate, 2006). For when you are feeling like you need more culture in your life.

The Classical Good CD & DVD Guide, 2006 is a 1400+ page book of over 3000 reviews of Classical music CDs currently available. Really quite good.

Popularity: 25% [?]

A bad play is a bad play, and though, like some bad statuary and abominable stained glass, it may assist the prayers of the faithful, it will do nothing to convince the world at large that the Christian religion is worthy of intelligent consideration. And I am not altogether sure even about the faithful; does bad art really do for them anything that good art would not do better? — Dorothy L. Sayers, “Playwrights Are Not Evangelists”

You probably know Dorothy Sayers as the creator of Sir Peter Wimsey and the murder mysteries he so capably solved. She was also apparently a bit of a Christian theologian. A recent book (2005) by Laura Simmons entitled Creed Without Chaos: Exploring Theology in the Writings of Dorothy Sayers offers reflections on Sayers and loci such as the incarnation, the Trinity, sin and evil, vocation, words and language, women’s issues, and a chapter on creativity and art, which begins with the quote offered above and continues,

Nothing has done more to fasten the stigma of insincerity and stupidity upon the Christian religion,” acknowledged Dorothy L. Sayers, “than the horrid florescence of ‘religious’ art.” Sayers, like many Christian artists, thought deeply about the relationship between the church and the arts. She worried in a letter to the bishop of Coventry that “the reason why one doesn’t expect a professing Christian as such to be witty or intelligent or artistic or lively is that we don’t really believe that God is any of these agreeable things or the source of them.” Laura K. Simmons, Creed Without Chaos: Exploring Theology in the Writings of Dorothy L. Sayers (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005) p133.

My sense is that this is changing among this next generation of Christians. Do you think the whole conversation about being ” emergent,” or even the apparent rise in Reformed theology among the present twenty- and thirty-somethings of Christians is evidence of this?

Popularity: 11% [?]