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”

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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.]

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Art, Books, Commonplaces, History, Uncategorized | No Comments »

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: 29% [?]

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