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List of contents
Foreword
Introduction: Karl Rahner, Theology and the Arts
Part 1 Prelude – Faith, Culture, Theology, and the Senses
1. Faith and Culture
2. On the Theology of Books
3. God’s Word and Human Books
4. The Theology of the Symbol
5. Seeing and Hearing
Part 2 On Literature
6. Priest and Poet
7. Poetry and the Christian
8. On the Task of the Writer in Relation to Christian Living
9. On the Greatness and the Plight of the Christian Writer
Part 3 On Visual Art and Architecture
10. Theology and the Arts
11. Art against the Horizon of Theology and Piety
12. The Theology of the Religious Meaning of Images
13. Church Building: On Modern Church Architecture
Part 4 On Music
14. Word and Music in Church
15. What Do the Beatles sing?
16. An Ordinary Song
Postlude
17. Prayer for Creative Thinkers
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Gesa E. Thiessen lectured for many years at Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy, Dublin. An Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of Religion at Trinity College Dublin, Visiting Scholar at Sarum College, Salisbury, and a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa, she has published widely on theology and the arts and on ecumenical ecclesiology. She is a non-stipendiary minister in the Lutheran Church in Ireland.
Summary
This book is made up of a collection of texts unavailable in one volume until now, including six previously untranslated essays, from a major theologian of the twentieth century.
Rahner’s numerous writings focused on the revelation of God as mystery in the world and on the human being who has an essential openness towards the transcendent. His articles reveal an empathy and a depth of insight into the relationship between theology, faith and the arts which are remarkable and may take the reader by surprise.
More recently, Rahner’s contribution to the growing field of theology and the arts has been recognised by leading theologians on this subject. He asserts that theology must integrate the verbal and non-verbal arts as they are authentic means of human self-expression, of religious experience, and of God’s self-communication; and therefore they are essential sources of theology. Rahner argues that theology, understood as a person’s ‘reflexive self-expression’ about him- or herself ‘in the light of divine revelation’, cannot be regarded as complete until ‘the arts become an intrinsic moment of theology itself’.
