Art, Imagination and Christian Hope

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 in the University of St Andrews. He is author of Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart (Continuum, 2009) and co-edited the collection Romanticism and Religion (with Jane Stabler, Ashgate 2006). Jeremy Begbie is Thomas A. Langford Research Professor of Theology at Duke University, Durham, NC. He has authored and edited several books and is an editor for the series Ashgate Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts.

• 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 Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and Beethoven’s 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 José Saramago’s 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.

'This book is a very thought-provoking collection of essays. Each one in its own way gives an answer to the Nietzschean critique of Christianity as a ’Platonism for the masses’ by showing how the Christian notion of hope in the reality of eternity does not have to take on the other-worldly form detached from the life ’here-and-now’.' Themelios ’...[provides] a welcome emphasis on music as well as literature. The musical score excerpts are beautifully reproduced...’ Art and Christianity