We have a book cover!
We have a book cover!
I’ve spent the past four years working with my friend Dan Train on a project that pulls together sixteen scholars and artists in order to show how the doctrine of the Holy Spirit might both illuminate and be illuminated through the arts.
Drawing on specific examples from a wide range of media—music, poetry, visual art, film, and landscape architecture—each chapter in the book seeks to deepen our understanding of a particular name for the Holy Spirit as it relates to the Spirit’s distinctive work in the world.
For our authors, the following names become central to their investigations: “The Spirit as Breath,” “The Spirit as Breadth,” “The Outpouring Spirit,” “The Overshadowing Spirit,” “The Illumining Spirit,” “The Particularizing Spirit,” “The Spirit as Bond of Peace,” “The Comforting and Disrupting Spirit,” “The Convicting Spirit,” “The Spirit of Shalom,” and “The Spirit of Freedom.”
The basic contention of the book is that art can become a form of enriching our confession in the Holy Spirit as “the Lord and Giver of life,” as the Nicene Creed puts it. Art can do so because it functions as a distinctive mode of reasoning which enables thereby us to know God and the manifold things of God’s world through imaginative, sensory, affective and metaphoric means.
Art can likewise enable us to perceive connections in and across Holy Scripture that we might not perceive through the usual analytical and discursive means of exegetical or systematic study.
And art can attune us to the unique ways in which the Spirit not only forms a people to bear Christ’s image in the world but also is always and already at work in the world at large, tending and mending, illumining and reconciling, sustaining and perfecting this world that God so loves.
The book, which is being published by IVP Academic, will see the light of day in September 2025, just in time for the DITA conference, “Visible & Invisible: Surprising Encounters in Theology and the Arts.”
Dan and I are deeply grateful for each of the contributors to this book, not only for their hard labors on the project but also for their friendship and partnership in the cause of theology and the arts.
We’ll see you in 2025!
Some of the book’s contributors at a recent gathering at Belmont University in Nashville.
