Art, Imagination and Christian Hope Patterns of Promise [Hardcover]

In hope, Christian faith reconfigures the shape of what is familiar in order to pattern the contours of God's promised future. In this process, the present is continuously re-shaped by ventures of hopeful and expectant living. In art, this same poetic interplay between past, present and future takes specific concrete forms, furnishing vital resources for sustaining an imaginative ecology of hope. This volume attends to the contributions that architecture, drama, literature, music and painting can make, as artists trace patterns of promise, resisting the finality of modernity's despairing visions and generating hopeful living in a present which, although marked by sin and death, is grasped imaginatively as already pregnant with future.Contents: Introduction; Time, eternity and the arts, Richard Bauckham; Patterns of hope and images of eternity: listening to Shakespeare, Blake and T.S. Eliot, Paul S. Fiddes; Space and time: eschatological dimensions of Christian architecture, A.N. Williams; Echoes of hope in Monteverdis LOrfeo and Beethovens Fidelio, Daniel K.L. Chua; Brave new world? Faith, hope and the political imagination, Kirsten Deede Johnson; The unique psychology of hope, Patricia Bruininks; The challenge of a hopeless God: negotiating Jos? Saramagos novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Bruce W. Longenecker; Hoping against hope: Morrissey and the light that never goes out, Gavin Hopps; Unexpected endings: eucatastrophic consolations in literature and theology, Trevor Hart; Index.Trevor Hart is Professor of Divinity and Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the University of St Andrews. He has authored and edited several books including a collection (Faithful Performances, with Steven Guthrie) for Ashgate Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts, a series for which he is an editor. Gavin Hopps is Lecturer in Literature and Theology and Associate Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts inl3)