Art, Imagination and Christian Hope: Patterns of Promise

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.

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.