In Search of the Sacred Book studies the artistic incorporation of religious concepts such as prophecy, eternity, and the afterlife in the contemporary Latin American novel. It departs from sociopolitical readings by noting the continued relevance of religion in Latin American life and culture, despite modernity's powerful secularizing influence. Analyzing Jorge Luis Borges's secularized "narrative theology" in his essays and short stories, the book follows the development of the Latin American novel from the early twentieth century until today by examining the attempts of major novelists, from María Luisa Bombal, Alejo Carpentier, and Juan Rulfo, to Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and José Lezama Lima, to "sacralize" the novel by incorporating traits present in the sacred texts of many religions. It concludes with a view of the "desacralization" of the novel by more recent authors, from Elena Poniatowska and Fernando Vallejo to Roberto Bolaño.

The essays cover a full range of images, including panel paintings, altarpieces, manuscripts, and wall paintings, and a rich variety of socioreligious settings, private, monastic, and imperial.

This fascinating study of parallel movements sheds new light on spiritual art. More importantly, it asks us to look again at that art and its role in divine revelation, to see what riches are there and what lessons may be learned for a reinvigorated sacred art today.

If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. Mistrusted by philosophy, forbidden and embraced by religions, manipulated as “spectacle” and proliferated in the media, images never cease to present their multiple aspects, their paradoxes, their flat but receding spaces. What is this power that lies in the depths and recesses of an image—which is always only an impenetrable surface? What secrets are concealed in the ground or in the figures of an image—which never does anything but show just exactly what it is and nothing else? How does the immanence of images open onto their unimaginable others, their imageless origin? In this collection of writings on images and visual art, Jean-Luc Nancy explores such questions through an extraordinary range of references. From Renaissance painting and landscape to photography and video, from the image of Roman death masks to the language of silent film, from Cleopatra to Kant and Heidegger, Nancy pursues a reflection on visuality that goes far beyond the many disciplines with which it intersects. He offers insights into the religious, cultural, political, art historical, and philosophical aspects of the visual relation, treating such vexed problems as the connection between image and violence, the sacred status of images, and, in a profound and important essay, the forbidden representation of the Shoah. In the background of all these investigations lies a preoccupation with finitude, the unsettling forces envisaged by the images that confront us, the limits that bind us to them, the death that stares back at us from their frozen traits and distant intimacies. In these vibrant and complex essays, a central figure in European philosophy continues to work through some of the most important questions of our time.

In the wake of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, the archbishop of Bologna, wrote a remarkable treatise on art during a time when the Church feared rampant abuse in the arts. Paleotti's 'Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images' argues that art should address a broad audience and explains the painter's responsibility to his spectators.

Underlying the religious art of the Renaissance is a tension between the needs of the Church and the impulse to create great works. This beautifully illustrated book presents sacred images from the 15th and 16th centuries, leading up to two pivotal events in 1563. The Council of Trent, which signified the beginning of the Counter-Reformation, defined requirements that curtailed the freedom of painters and patrons in creating art for churches, while the founding of the Accademia del Desegno in Florence symbolically acknowledged that artists had achieved the status of creators not craftsmen. The author takes a fresh look at some of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance not typically associated with sacred imagery and shows how they navigated their way through the paradox of 'limited freedom' to forge a new kind of religious art. -- from Book Jacket

In these studies Gary Vikan has opened new perspectives on the daily life and material culture of Late Antiquity - more specifically, on icons and relics, and on objects revealing of the world of pilgrimage, the early cult of saints, and marriage. He contextualizes these familiar categories of object in the patterns of belief and ritual extracted from contemporary texts and the objects themselves, in order to understand their meaning within the everyday lives of those by whom and for whom they were made. The studies give a nuanced delineation of the inherently ambiguous boundary between conventional religion and magic, noting repeatedly those instances wherein the two are invoked in the same breath (and by way of the same art object), toward the same end. From this historically constructed matrix of art, belief, and ritual, the author derives an anthropologically defined paradigm of charisma and pilgrimage (applied in one essay, as an intriguing parallel, to deconstructing the world of a contemporary secular "saint," Elvis Presley).

Before the Renaissance and Reformation, holy images were treated not as "art" but as objects of veneration which possessed the tangible presence of the Holy. the faithful believed that these images served as relics and were able to work miracles, deliver oracles, and bring victory to the battlefield. In this magisterial book, Hans Belting traces the long history of the sacral image and its changing role--from surrogate for the represented image to an original work of art--in European culture. Likeness and Presence looks at the beliefs, superstitions, hopes, and fears that come into play as people handle and respond to sacred images, and presents a compelling interpretation of the place of the image in Western history. -- Back cover

An excellent resource book and the only one of its kind, covering the two most controversial images in existence: the Holy Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the tilma of Juan Diego and the Sacred Image of the crucified Christ on the Shroud of Turin. Both presentations give ample scientific evidence of their authenticity. The author, with a physical science background, has brought the reader up to date on the latest Shroud findings. At the same time, he exposes the fraudulent carbon-14 tests.

Through close examination of the physical, physhological and mythological aspects of phallos, the author differentiates masculinity from patriarchy and discovers a mysterious, divine reality coequal with the maternal principle as an originating force in the psyche.